


Kwan the Astronaut

by kakawot



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Astronauts, Dimension Travel, Gen, IN SPACE!, Identity Reveal, Space Stations, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 19:24:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 65,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kakawot/pseuds/kakawot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thirteen years after high school Danny and Kwan meet up again – and this time they're astronauts on board the ISS. Danny (and Technus) manage to get them mixed up in alternate dimensions, future and history, towing the billion dollar station after them, trying to get it back to Earth undamaged. Will they succeed, or will the Ghost Zone eat the ISS?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Meetings, Trainings and Failure

A somewhat familiar voice spoke behind Kwan. The male voice was full of disbelief and a hint of annoyance.

"You have _got_ to be kidding me."

Kwan tried to place the voice in the second between hearing it and turning around, but all his brain provided was 'heard it a long time ago'. When he caught sight of the man who had uttered the sentence he still couldn't place him.

Black hair, a bit short, clothed in the easily recognizable blue NASA jumpsuit. No name came to mind. Kwan realized he should've said something by now, so he stumbled over his words to get a reply out.

"What's so hard to be kidding? I mean- why are you so surprised?"

The man's features hardened, his blue eyes roving over Kwan's own blue jumpsuit as if looking for something that proved it was a fake. Kwan took the opportunity to eye the nametag of the unfamiliar man. And then it came crashing back. He'd bellowed the name enough times in his high school years, after all.

"Fenton!"

"Ah, so you _do_ know my real last name," said Fenton. Kwan furrowed his brow as he searched back along his memories why Fenton's tone was so bitter. He remembered a small boy his own age but a good head shorter. Kwan held no real grudge against him, but his old friend Dash had it out for the kid. Ah, that explained the tone. And now the kid was an astronaut, same as Kwan.

"I haven't seen you in years! How are you doing?" asked Kwan. He held out his hand for Fenton to shake (what was his first name? Something with a D?). Fenton looked at it for a second, sighed and shook it nonetheless. Kwan took that as a good sign.

"I'm fine, joined NASA, got married and trying to get into the next shuttle heading for the ISS. You?"

Kwan smiled at the broad life summary. "My life pretty much happened the same way. Though I'm engaged, not married yet."

"Congratulations, I suppose."

"And you," retorted Kwan. After that the conversation dried up, because what did you say to your regular bully victim in high school after this many years? Kwan only had one thing to ask, "What was your first name again? It's on the tip on my tongue…"

"Danny. And I never learned your last name, to be honest."

Kwan smiled at Danny before answering. "It's Lin, but I prefer 'Kwan'."

He wanted to add something about all the years they shared a classroom, all the crazy things that happened in and around Amity Park, but he was interrupted by his boss. _Their_ boss now, if he understood Danny correctly about also being on the ISS-team.

"Ah, I see you two have met already. Let's get this show started then, shall we?"

Without waiting for an answer their boss began to explain the new training they would have to endure to qualify for the ISS-team. Kwan glanced sideways at Danny, who focused intently on the explanation. He hoped that they would be able to talk it out, because if all went well they would be stuck in a series of metal tubes which would give a squirrel claustrophobia, let alone a human being. Teamwork was essential.

A question still nagged him though: how _did_ a, let's face it, scrawny kid like Fenton get into NASA?

XXX

They trained together for three months, but every milliliter of sweat was worth it when they got the memo that they were allowed on the next flight to the International Space Station. During those three months Kwan got to know Danny a lot better. He wasn't necessarily book smart like so many other geeks, but he had a way of turning problems upside down and shaking them until a solution fell out. And it worked, most of the time.

Danny was in charge of the ectoplasmic experiments they would perform on the space station. Kwan had to read up on a whole lot of ghost-related topics before his knowledge came even close to that of Danny's. It was as if the guy _knew_ what ectoplasmic energy was on a first-person basis.

Their teamwork had improved a lot from the first frosty conversation, but Kwan didn't know if that was because Danny was determined to make it to the space station or if Danny genuinely liked Kwan. Kwan never disliked Danny in high school, it was Dash's doing that made Danny so often a bullying target. At that time it seemed simpler to stay with the popular crowd and push some geeks around. Now Kwan knew that those geeks often became the bosses of the jock-type kids. Luckily he had been able to let go of the stereotypical jock behavior.

And, truth be told, he had Danny to thank for that, and for his astronaut-ambition.

It had been a simple presentation in Astronomy class. They all had to do a presentation on a subject, be it about a planet or Einstein's theory of special relativity. Kwan had presented a paper about the possibilities of life in another galaxy, but Danny's presentation was by far the best. Even then Kwan could admire the way Danny spoke with such enthusiasm, such conviction that he'd be out there one day. Kwan had forgotten what the subject was, but the notion of 'become an astronaut' had somehow stuck.

After the disaster with Miss Spectra's 'counseling', where he had realized he wasn't working towards a future at all, he decided to at least choose one ambitious career path besides football player. He chose 'astronaut'.

Gradually he had realized that space interested him. He began to read more about it, and slowly he worked on improving his grades. Miss Spectra had told him that after high school it would be all downhill for him, but he became determined to prove her wrong. He took on extra math classes, trained even more to keep his body in shape and read his way through the library.

It had been grueling work to keep up with NASA's outrageous demands, but somehow he made the cut. The fact that he knew a thing or two about ectoplasm was a huge bonus, which probably got him into the program. This new science branch had very few reputable scientists, and NASA probably saw applications for space travel strewn all over. Ghosts could fly effortlessly, and ghost energy was real and could be harnessed. The ecto-converter they were going to install to power part of the ISS proved that.

And now Kwan and Danny were ready to take on their first mission together. They would fly out to the ISS, where the current crew would train them further in handling the space station. Then they would leave , leaving Danny and Kwan alone to man the station. They could conduct their experiments for twenty days, and then a new crew would join for them to train. After twenty more days it was back to Earth for them.

Kwan felt ready.

XXX

"I've been meaning to ask," said Kwan two nights before they were scheduled to launch. "How did you get into NASA? If you'd followed the regular road, I'd have met you before."

Danny looked up at Kwan from his book. He vaguely waved a hand in a direction. "Oh, I got in on a special training about ectoplasm and such. Got my parents to thank for that, to be honest. If it weren't for their expertise, I'd probably be working in an office, dreaming of the stars."

Kwan was a bit taken aback. He came from Amity Park, why hadn't NASA offered him the same special training? If relatively weak guy like Danny could get into the ISS program, Kwan would be a perfect candidate. Not that he was resentful, he just found it a bit odd.

"Your parents… they always wore jumpsuits, didn't they?" asked Kwan. Danny blew out a long-suffering sigh and laid his book down. Kwan saw that it was the manual for the ecto-converter they'd bring to and install on the ISS.

"Yeah, and they still do. Bright blue and neon orange, quite hard to miss. They made me wear one to high school one day."

"Wow, rough."

Danny stretched out before replying, "Yeah, that day kinda sucked. But I survived and now it's only two days until launch. I still can't quite believe it."

"Tell me about it," said Kwan. "I can't wait till they countdown for the lift-off. Maybe then I'll realize it's real."

XXX

Danny's grin was so wide Kwan feared his face might split open. The endless black expanse of space was spread out in front of them, with the Earth revolving below. Kwan had seen thousands of pictures of the Earth at this angle, but none of them could have prepared him for the beauty of it. It was so huge and so small, so fragile but somehow it sustained life, and lots of it. Kwan had never been good with words, so he settled for 'majestic' and focused on his own body instead of the view.

"It's real," whispered Kwan to himself. Since he was strapped down he couldn't feel himself float off, but he certainly felt something screwing with his equilibrium.

The radio jerked them both back into reality.

"Come in, Akh's Vessel."

Kwan touched the microphone on his helmet and replied, "We hear you, ground control, over."

Ground control guided them to the waiting bosom of the docks of the ISS. With skills trained a thousand times in the simulator Danny and Kwan guided the shuttle into one of its docks. Without a sound the two manmade space faring objects joined together. Only then did Kwan dare release his own relieved grin, and he made a motion to high-five Danny. Their clothed hands met and although the sound was muffled, the gesture was honest. Somehow these two kids from Amity Park had made it into space.

And now the real work began.

On board their ship they had taken a dozen ecto samples with them, to test and manipulate and see if any of it could be used as fuel. It was a lot cheaper to manufacture than rocket fuel, and the versatile energy form could be used for other purposes as well. But first they had to get to know the ISS. Kwan had trained himself silly on the simulator, with Danny right by his side. Danny knew more about the controls at first, but Kwan quickly caught up to him, thanks in part to Danny's unusual behavior.

Sometimes Danny dropped everything and left for a few hours. NASA had given him special permission to do so.

One time Kwan had tried to question him about it, but Danny cut him off and refused to answer any questions about the subject. But since NASA had given permission, Kwan wasn't the one to question him. Their superior thought it was fine, even when Kwan brought up it with him. So he let it drop too, though not without occasionally asking Danny where he went when he did that. But Danny was a master of evasion, always changing the subject and giving non-committal answers.

But on board the ISS Danny had nowhere to run. The space they could move around in was tiny, no more than 350 square feet. Kwan had to get used to that the first few days, as well as sleeping while being bound to a wall. He had practiced the whole routine on Earth, but in space it was different. The first days were exhausting enough though, so he had little trouble with that.

Space sickness was more of an issue for him. Weighing nothing was incredibly disorientating and as a result he threw up five times in the space of two days. After that his body adjusted to the alien surroundings. Danny didn't seem bothered at all. He floated around like he had done this a thousand times before. Kwan brought it up once.

"All this floating, it just feels so ... unnatural," he said.

"It doesn't to me," replied Danny. "Then again, I guess that's expected," he muttered.

"Why's that?" asked Kwan. Danny jerked as if he'd just realized he had said that out loud. His eyes shot in all directions as he tried to come up with a reply.

"Because, err, in the special training I got a lot of zero g training. _A lot_ ," he emphasized for good measure.

"Cool," replied Kwan. And with that the subject was closed.

After having been trained enough by the current crew, they left. The moment Kwan saw the space shuttle disappear, swallowed against the backdrop of the Earth, the responsibility crushed down upon him. If he screwed up, they would both die. And he would probably come back as a ghost and have to endure those ghost hunters in Amity Park.

"Want to get to work on those samples?" asked Danny at Kwan's back.

Kwan pushed himself off the side of the room to turn himself around and look Danny in the eyes. Danny floated in mid-air, not touching the walls. Kwan scowled at that. They had been instructed to always keep a hand on the walls to propel themselves. When they got better at navigating in micro gravity, they could float around like seasoned astronauts. But for now they had better keep a hand on the walls or suffer having to flail around, not able to touch anything and get some Newton laws action. There were very few spots where that could happen, thanks to the claustrophobia-inducing space station, but there were a few. And Danny the Genius managed to float in one.

"Hang on, I'll get you out," sighed Kwan. Danny looked around quizzically.

"Get me out of what?" he asked.

"A dead spot." Kwan gestured towards the space around Danny. It was devoid of walls or anything to grab onto, not even if you stretched out. And since Danny was short, he had no chance of getting himself out.

"Oh, no need to-" Danny stopped talking and slapped himself in the forehead. "I mean, of course, thanks. Can you give me a little push?"

Kwan raised one eyebrow at the sudden change in attitude, but he pushed off nonetheless. He gently shoved Danny away and he himself slowly floated towards the wall.

"Thanks," said Danny. "Now, the experiments. Shall we?"

"Lead the way," replied Kwan.

XXX

It took them three days before they broached the subject 'high school'. They mentioned it before, shared a few laughs over teachers, but they hadn't really _talked_ about it. Somehow being enclosed in such a small space made the whole situation seem surreal. Casper High was thousands of miles away, but their shared history in that building hung in the air like an invisible wall. It separated them, just like the clothes and friends had separated them in high school.

Kwan had thought back a lot to those days since he first saw Danny at NASA. He wished he could go back and tell his younger self that it all worked out in the end. Life didn't end after high school, it became better than ever before. Even for a jock like him, as long as you were willing to work for it.

On the third day of their solo mission he asked Danny a question, the answer to which would haunt him for weeks.

They worked on inspecting the ecto-samples to determine if the energy it gave off while in microgravity was the same as on Earth. This process involved a lot of waiting while the computer processed the batches. They maximized efficiency by constantly creating new batches for the computer to process, but even so there was a lot of downtime.

During one of those downtimes Kwan positioned himself closer to Danny.

"If you could talk to your younger self, what would you say?"

Danny shot him a glance while he worked on the batch. He didn't look at Kwan while answering.

"I'd tell him to try to get home schooled, to avoid a whole lot of trouble."

Kwan cocked his head at that answer. "What kind of trouble?"

Danny blew out a sigh which made his black bangs wave around as if possessed. "Usual and unusual high school trouble. Oversleeping, sports, ghost hunter parents… And you?"

"I'd tell myself to work harder and not worry so much about how life was going to be after high school. They say it's the best time of your life, but I think it just got better and better."

Danny threw a half-hearted grin at Kwan. The grin was an attempt at humor, but Kwan spotted the hard eyes.

"It sure did. I couldn't wait to get out of high school. It had the best highs, but also the worst lows. I'd tell my younger self to… endure it, I guess, because life became a whole lot better when I got into college. Even if it was community college."

Kwan filed the tidbit about community college away for later. No astronaut who went to community college had ever gotten into NASA, but Danny somehow made it.

But the invisible wall which was becoming a shimmering haze was more important right now.

"What was so bad about it?" asked Kwan. He feared he already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from Danny's mouth.

Danny loaded the batch into the computer before turning around and looking Kwan in the eyes. The grin had vacated Danny's face completely. Instead he wore the look of someone who saw his childhood dreams die at an early age. And he pulled no punches.

"All the bullying made it some pretty horrible years, Kwan. Constantly getting slammed into lockers, made fun of, pushed off gym equipment… And let's not forget the ridicule, the name-calling, the beat downs. I was so happy to get out of that place I could've flown out of there. Err, not literally, of course."

"Oh," replied Kwan. It was all he could think of to say. He didn't know if he wanted to continue the conversation, but now that the botched train was in motion he should punch it and wait for the wreck.

"I guess we were kind of hard on you. Though it wasn't… personal." Kwan realized how stupid that sounded the second it left his mouth. He waved his hands in the air and spoke quickly to head off Danny's reply.

"I mean, it wasn't with me. Dash kind of had it in for you. I still have no idea why, cause you're a pretty cool guy. But I guess-"

"Guessing isn't going to help me, Kwan," replied Danny coolly. He crossed his arms and frowned, but then released the frown with a sigh. "At least you didn't pick on me. Much. I can't imagine having to stay here with Dash. That used to be the stuff of nightmares for me. Did you know he once made me eat his underwear?"

Kwan gagged at the thought alone. But then the memory came floating back. "I thought that was a dare. You lost that one fair and square."

"He would've made me eat his underwear even if I won, Kwan. Though, trust me, I tried everything in my power to win that dare. What I'm trying to say… I don't really know what I'm trying to say. High school was a time of highs and lows for me, Kwan. Some really low lows, but I got over them."

Danny pushed off the wall and turned his back to Kwan. Kwan heard him mutter one more thing to himself before he floated off into Columbus, one of the two laboratories. "Yeah, that's what I'd say."

This conversation rattled Kwan's assuredness that his behavior in high school wasn't really out of the norm. Apparently, to a bully victim like Danny, he had been one of the guys who made his life miserable. Even as a natural optimist who saw figures in the darkest thunderclouds, this made Kwan unhappy. He had deluded himself into thinking that his words hadn't really had that much impact, that he'd just gone along to make his own life easier.

"I wasn't that bad… was I?" he asked the emptiness of space. But it gave him no answer.

XXX

The conversation replayed itself over and over in Kwan's head. His work didn't suffer under it, nor did his conversations with Danny, but in his mind he devised a plan to make amends. He'd been hard on Danny once, now he was going to go soft.

Kwan worked even harder to ease Danny's work and life. He always made sure to have the entire batch of ecto-samples analyzed by the time Danny was in Columbus so Danny could process it, he was more considerate of Danny's sleep patterns and sacrificed the best bits of his food to Danny.

All this attention hadn't gone unnoticed.

"I don't know what you're trying to pull," began Danny three days after Kwan had decided to make Danny's life easier, "but I'm not sure I like it. This is becoming … creepy, the way you act around me."

"I didn't mean anything by it," tried Kwan, but Danny's disbelieving upraised eyebrow was enough to break Kwan. He sighed.

"Alright, I guess I'm trying to say - I'm sorry about high school."

"Oh." This time it was Danny who had nothing to say. He floated there, dumbfounded. His slow momentum carried him into a dead spot again while he was trying to think of something to say. Danny had a habit of doing that, Kwan noticed.

"So just… accept it, alright? It makes me feel better."

"Alright, but you don't have to-"

"And let me help you with that dead spot," interjected Kwan. It really did make him feel better. Every bit of decency was a bit of debt repaid, or so Kwan thought. He pushed off the wall and once again bumped into Danny, to help him grab onto the walls of the space station.

"Thanks," said Danny. Kwan wasn't sure which of the two things he was talking about.

XXX

Over the next days Kwan's special treatment tapered off. He simply couldn't keep up his attentions. He barely got any sleep and that affected his work performance. And when a thin bit of steel was all that stood between you and death, paying attention was very, very important. So he let it go. Danny didn't seem to mind. He even seemed happier now that Kwan was back to his old self, the optimistic guy who didn't let that much guilt bother him into the point of blind obedience.

On the fifth day, while Danny was strapped to his bed, Kwan floated by the bedroom.

"Hey, Kwan?" called Danny. Kwan floated back to the entrance.

"Yeah?"

"I forgive you."

Kwan had trouble forming a reply in his mind for a few long seconds. What do you say to that? He never had anyone forgive him like that, so vocally. It usually happened with a smile, a wave, a hug. To have the words spoken out loud was like picking up a bowling ball and finding out it's a cannonball.

Finally he decided there was only one reply Danny wanted to hear.

"Thanks," said Kwan. He floated near the man for a few seconds before he pushed off and disappeared into one the narrow tubes leading to Columbus.

XXX

Kwan looked at the readouts. If they were correct, this was bad. Amity-Park-transported-to-Ghost-Zone bad. Now that had been an ordeal to remember. But Kwan's mind didn't wander to remember the ordeal, he was focused on the readouts and what they implied.

"Danny? Could you come over here for a second?"

Kwan didn't quite manage to keep his voice steady, so Danny was by his side in under thirty seconds.

"Could you run this batch again and compare the readouts?"

Danny didn't complain but immediately set to work. Seven minutes later Kwan floated right next to Danny as they both read the numbers off the computer screen.

"No, no, this isn't right. It can't be right," mumbled Danny. He scrolled through the numbers so fast they became a blur, skipping up and down through the results, looking for something which would debunk Kwan's growing worry. But Kwan knew that Danny felt the same worry.

"I'm afraid it is. Which means-"

"Let's do the next batch," interrupted Danny. Already he grabbed the softly glowing ectoplasm and shoved it into the machinery. During the tense seven minute wait they didn't speak a word but just kept looking at the samples. Kwan sent silent prayers that the previous two readouts were somehow false or fake or a computer error.

Danny cursed long and loud when the computer beeped and the numbers appeared on the screen. Kwan joined him with a curse or two before scrolling through the numbers. The computer was in perfect condition, the equipment was barely used, so the problem had to lay with the samples.

"How could that ecto-virus get on board? We're in _space_!" yelled Danny.

"Maybe not every batch is contaminated. We've still got the separate ones in Leonardo."

"Those are contaminated too," growled Danny. "This is a very potent virus, I've dealt with it before. This one renders all the samples unusable for research. It's in constant-phase, so it just floats through everything, whether it's in Leonardo or not."

"But we have a shield set up around the samples-"

"But put one contaminated batch back with the others inside the shield…" Danny trailed off and Kwan's mind filled in the gaps. He thought that the ghost shield would prevent any and all ecto-impurities from sauntering in and contaminating the healthy batches.

"I think we should test all the batches before we draw any conclusions," said Kwan. He immediately set to work, Danny right beside him.

It took them six hours to test all of them for the virus, forgoing lunch and their exercise break. Kwan would catch up to that later, but for now it was more important to know if their entire project would ground to a halt this early on. He prayed to whatever deity came to mind, but it didn't help.

"All of them!" cried Danny. "Every. single. one. We're screwed."

Kwan, always the optimistic one, peered at the numbers one last time. But they didn't change and didn't show him what he was hoping for.

"We always have the ecto-converter to test," began Kwan, but Danny leveled him with such an ugly look he stopped talking.

"Just, just… let me think about it, okay? Maybe we can find a way to get the virus out of the samples. Or maybe there's another way…"

Danny pushed himself off the wall and floated off. Kwan heard him softly talking to himself as he drifted through the space station. With a sigh Kwan began to clean up the mess of samples they had created in their desperate search for a good batch. After that he grabbed his tablet PC and began to read up on the virus. He wasn't going to give up that easily.

XXX

"Did you-" began Danny, but his hopeful tone deflated into a sullen "okay" when Kwan shook his head.

"Nothing in the literature, nothing on the internet, nothing according to your parents."

Danny did a double-take at that. "You asked _my parents_?"

Kwan raised one eyebrow. "You do know that they're leading scientists on ectoscience? They somehow get information no one else is able to procure."

Danny refused to look Kwan in the eyes as he slowly revolved around until he was upside-down. From Kwan's perspective at least, because there was no 'up' and 'down' in a space station.

"Did you think of anything?" asked Kwan. He could already guess the answer, but he was quite surprised when Danny nodded.

"There is one thing… but you'll find it very hard to believe."

Kwan also revolved himself around until he could look Danny in the eyes again. "What is it?"

Danny fidgeted with a piece of his jumpsuit, rolling it between his fingers. His whole demeanor spoke of nervousness, something Kwan didn't associate with Danny. The man was amazing in a moment of crisis, able to keep a level head and think up plans while under extreme pressure. But now he looked as nervous as a first-time mom who just heard she was going to give birth to triplets.

Danny took a deep breath and plunged into his story. Kwan listened with rapt interest.

"When I was fourteen," began Danny, "I was stupid enough to go into my parents' lab with Sam and Tucker. Sam dared me to walk into the non-functional ghost portal. I hit a button I shouldn't have and the thing turned on. With me still inside."

Danny stuck a hand inside his jumpsuit and got a needle out. Without even bothering to find an artery he plunged it into his arm and pulled on the plunger. Kwan winced at the action, but then the needle began to fill up and he could only gawk.

"Somehow ectoplasm bound itself to my blood. It doesn't harm me, but it doesn't do anything either. I often even forget it's there."

The needle was filled with a brown fluid, not even resembling human blood. It looked more like someone decided to go to a swamp and scrounge around in the mud until the needle was full. Small green flecks interspersed the muddy brown color. Red streaks were also visible in the mixture. The blood had a much higher density than normal human blood, and Kwan wondered how Danny's heart pumped this … porridge around.

Kwan looked back at Danny. Danny's gaze was intense, and Kwan couldn't blame him. There were so many things wrong with that explanation he wouldn't bet even two cents that it was true.

"So… the ectoplasm doesn't evaporate under those temperatures, like it should?"

Danny shook his head. "No, it doesn't. Or wait, yes, it doesn't. Anyhow - it's attached itself to my blood and something keeps them bound together. I haven't been able to figure out what yet, but I think I'm getting closer."

He took the needle out and rubbed over the sore spot for a second before he handed the needle to Kwan.

"We can separate the ectoplasm and the blood in the centrifuge. It should be pure enough to use it as samples. It's basic ectoplasm, after all."

Kwan kept the needle away from his body. He gave Danny one last, long look before he pushed off the wall and floated towards Destiny, the other laboratory where they kept the centrifuge.

"You owe me the complete version," he merely said, and looked Danny deep into his eyes. The man nodded slowly, as if weighing several life-altering options.

XXX

Once separated from the blood, the ectoplasm proved to be usable and virus-free. It was amazing what effects the ectoplasm had on the blood. The density of it appeared to be much higher, but it flowed like normal blood. The murky brown color disappeared once Kwan used the centrifuge, and only red and green remained.

"Must've been some accident," remarked Kwan when Danny floated into Columbus to check on his progress. "The ectoplasm has even attached itself to all your red blood cells."

"Yeah, it was. But we can use the ectoplasm, right?"

Kwan indicated the test tube filled with the green goo. "Surprisingly, yes. It's as pure as it's going to get, and virus-free. I think thanks to your immune system. As long as we keep destroy the contaminated batches, this one should be of use to us. We may have to redesign the original experiment, though, to make use of what we've got."

Danny sagged in relief at the announcement. "Thank god, I don't know what I would've done if we couldn't use this. This whole mission would've been for nothing."

Kwan hesitated before he asked the next question. "We do need more samples, though. I really don't want to come off as a vampire, but-"

"You need my blood," concluded Danny. "Don't worry, I've already begun loading up on iron-rich food. Not that we've got much of that on board, but I should be okay to donate some more ectoplasm."

"Here, let me help," said Kwan. But Danny didn't hand him the needle. Kwan noticed that it was the same needle Danny had used before. Medical supplies were limited and as long as Danny thoroughly sterilized that needle, it was safe for him to use it again. Kwan shuddered to think what would happen if any ectoplasm came into contact with his own blood.

Within seconds Danny and Kwan were now in possession of more ectoplasm for them to use. Kwan set the centrifuge to work and turned to Danny.

"Now I've got some questions for you, because I've never heard of a human having ectoplasm in his blood."

Danny crossed his arms defensively, the momentum of said action sent him slowly revolving around.

"And now you have. I really don't like to talk about it. Makes me feel like a freak."

Kwan was torn between pressing on and letting the subject lie. If he pressed on, he could break the tentative real friendship that was building between them. They were civil colleagues and could throw a joke or two around, but lately he'd begun to appreciate Danny a lot more than a normal colleague. If he pressed on now, their tiny bond might break. But he sensed that if he let it die now, he'd never get the chance to ask Danny about it again. It'd be a taboo subject.

He compromised.

"Alright, but I just want to know one thing - are there any other ghost-related side effects I should know about? Anything that could endanger the mission?"

It took Danny too long to answer. He chewed his cheek for a second or two, drew in a deep breath and replied, "No."

Kwan narrowed his eyes as he searched Danny for any sign that he was lying. He was no expert in psychology, but Danny's body language was as open as a guestbook. Anyone who came along could write things in it, defining the guestbook. And Danny didn't appear to be lying.

"Alright," said Kwan. "I believe you."

Even this small manipulation didn't wield any results, so he turned towards the centrifuge to process the ectoplasm.

"Thanks, Kwan," said Danny.

XXX

Things turned back to normal over the next few days. They used Danny's ectoplasm to run their experiments, Kwan never even mentioned the fact that it came from Danny's body and life was good on board the International Space Station.

They talked like before, and Danny seemed to open up a lot more. Kwan knew that if he brought up the ectoplasm bit he'd just get a cold shoulder, so he tried his best to be as nice as possible. He'd be stuck in small metal tubes with Danny for quite a bit, and a row was the last thing they needed right now.

They got to talking about their wives, or in Kwan's case, fiancée. Kwan had been engaged for six months and the wedding would in the spring, when he was safely back home.

"How did you meet?" asked Danny after another long day of floating around in the lab, performing the experiments.

"It's a funny story, actually," began Kwan with a soft laugh. "I met my fiancée at… alright, I met my fiancée at the gym. Nothing special about that."

Kwan ended with a bit of a disappointed note. It was the truth, but it just felt so boring. Danny laughed at Kwan's ending.

"Kwan, I met my wife at _high school_. There's nothing more boring than that."

Danny seemed to realize what he had just said and he looked at Kwan, a pleading look in his eyes. "Please don't tell her I said that."

"My lips are sealed," replied Kwan with a smile. He vaguely remembered Sam from his high school days. She was one of those Goth types, a vocal one at that. He'd joined her at a Goth poetry slam one time, but that had turned out to be a mistake. She was nice, he remembered that much.

She was the complete opposite of his own fiancée. Strange that he and Danny got along quite well, while if you put their wives into one room it'd be torn down in minutes.

There was one subject which was not open for discussion though, and he was suddenly curious whether Danny had thought about it yet.

"You thinking about having kids?"

He heard Danny sigh from his sleeping bag. "I don't know. It's quite a risk, and I don't know if we're ready."

"The risks aren't _that_ great, right? Millions of women are pregnant right now."

"Yeah, but our situation is … special."

Kwan decided not to pry any further. If Danny wanted to tell, he'd tell.

"And you?" asked Danny politely. Kwan looked up at the ceiling as he answered with a vague smile playing across his lips.

"We've been trying, but my fiancée has just gotten off the pill, so it could be a while."

"And you're not afraid. At all."

"Terrified," replied Kwan. "But I figure it's something that comes natural, like throwing a ball. You've got all these books and TV-shows and who knows what about raising a kid, but I think it's just about following your gut."

"Yeah…" said Danny. "I hope it'll be like that. If Sam and I ever have a child."

"I hope so. I think you'll make a great dad," said Kwan. He saw Danny smile, and his tone was genuine as he said, "You too, Kwan, you too."

The conversation died down after that, and strange ideas and images started to float through Kwan's head. He recognized it as his almost-asleep thoughts and he let the half-formed sentences drift through his brain.

And then something hit the side of the International Space Station.

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part is a mix of Danny Phantom tech and real life, so I claim artistic license on the technobabble. Enjoy!

Their response was immediate, drilled into them by thousands of hours of simulation. They got out of their sleeping bags, moved as quickly as they could to Zvezda, the component where they could control the station, and checked the readouts on the oxygen tanks and the sensors placed on the hull.

Something had hit them, alright, but the computer didn't know what. It wasn't debris or a meteor, nor did any of the segments of the Space Station fail. The computer merely told them that one of its sensors on the hull was gone thanks to… energy, apparently. The ex-sensor showed a brief spike of energy readings before it went off-line.

"Solar flare?" ventured Kwan, immediately checking the computer if that was possible. But the energy reading was confined to that single sensor.

"No, it's smaller than that," confirmed Danny. "Something very local. But it was no meteor or debris, then the sensor would just show damage. It was something with pure energy that off-lined the sensor."

"Confirm that all the other sensors are on-line. Let's check the-"

The International Space Station was hit again from the outside. A dull bang echoed around the metal tubes and reached them while the both of them frantically consulted the computer what it could have been. The bang cut Kwan's words short and they renewed their search efforts with twice as much haste.

When Danny inhaled sharply Kwan immediately looked at him. The man's breath was briefly visible, as if they were back on Earth, standing knee-deep in snow.

"Oh no," whispered Danny. "Here? Now?" he added with a bit more force. Before Kwan could stop him he abandoned his post (Kwan made a note to report him for that later) and pushed himself towards the nearest window. For some reason he stared outside intently, eyes sweeping from left to right. When he didn't find what he was looking for he headed for the small screen which showed the view from space through the various cameras installed on the Space Station. Expertly Danny typed in the commands to call up the board camera.

There was a man floating in space, completely unprotected. He floated to the right of the station, and was apparently laughing. Or convulsing, because Kwan couldn't hear him.

"What the-" said Kwan, leaving his own post behind to get a better look.

The man wore a long, dark coat and sported a white-haired mullet. Kwan didn't know if it was the camera's fault or not, but the man looked mightily green-skinned. In fact, he was as green as Kwan's childhood frog plush.

"That's a ghost," observed Kwan in a neutral voice. As a citizen of Amity Park the novelty of ghosts wore off quite soon, until they became pests and annoyances, occasionally swooping in to do more damage than usual. "What is a ghost doing here?" continued Kwan his rhetorical questionnaire. But to Danny it wasn't a rhetorical question, apparently.

"I know that ghost," he said grimly. His eyes narrowed at the screen. "I- my parents have fought him several times. They're ghost hunters."

"I know," replied Kwan promptly. Of course he knew who Jack and Maddie Fenton were, the whole town knew of them. First they were two bozos cruising around town in a souped-up RV, but they often fought the ghosts that appeared more and more often in Amity Park. Once they teamed up with Danny Phantom they became an efficient ghost hunting team, alleviating the threat against Amity Park.

"His name is Technus," continued Danny as if he hadn't been interrupted. "He loves all technological things and can possess them. He's not that smart, but he's very tech-savvy. Maybe we can get him to blurt out his plan."

"Any idea why he's here?" asked Kwan, but Danny shook his head.

"The supercomputer Axion Labs used has been taken down, and no other satellite has the power he needs. I guess he's here for this station. Come on, maybe if we goad him enough…"

Kwan pointed at the screen. "He can't hear us."

"Maybe he's going to try to take over the computer - then we can hear him."

"By then it'll be too late, won't it?"

"It's going to take him a while to hack into it, and in the meantime we can stop him."

"How long do you reckon?"

"Oh, about seven to eight minutes," said a new voice right behind them. Kwan and Danny whirled around at the same time and came face to face with another floating being. It was the same mullet-wearing ghost. Kwan was secretly glad he hadn't heard him laugh, because his voice like that sounded annoying enough already.

"Hello," greeted the ghost with a sneer. Danny leapt at him to the best of his abilities while floating, but the ghost easily stepped aside in mid-air to avoid the lunge.

"Temper, temper. I'm just here for your solar panels, not your lives," said Technus.

"What do you need our solar panels for, Technus?" asked Danny in a voice of steel. Kwan didn't know where Danny got that attitude from, to speak like that to such a volatile creature.

"Oh, just my latest and best creation so far," said Technus off-handedly. "And that's all you'll get out of me, child," he warned. Danny's frown deepened at the 'child' remark, but he kept quiet. With a hand signal behind his back he warned Kwan to do the same. In the awkward silence Technus looked from Danny to Kwan and back. Finally he caved in.

"My latest creation being the biggest satellite, to control them all!"

The ghost pointed at the screen. To the right something drifted into view.

It was a satellite, but only in the broadest sense of the word. It looked like a three-year old boy got into the shed and hammered all the metal things he could find together. The satellite had a roughly rectangular shape, with bits and pieces sticking out. The metal the ghost had used was gray, although Kwan could make out bits that had been painted in a previous life. Antennae and radio dishes erupted from the behemoth like partial goose bumps and it was about fifty feet across.

"What are you, the outer space garbage man?" sneered Danny. Technus puffed his chest out and pointed at the satellite.

"This is my greatest invention! I no longer need to use technology from others, I can create it myself! I found all these satellites and rockets just floating around the Earth, so I decided to build my own satellite to hack into all the others and control every technological thing in the world!"

"Didn't you do that exact same thing fourteen years ago?" said Danny.

"I'm revisiting a classic," retorted Technus with disdain. "And then I used a supercomputer. This computer is three, no, four times as powerful. With this I can truly rule the world!"

Kwan looked from left to right as he followed the encounter. Danny sounded … bored, somehow. Any citizen of Amity Park had long since gotten used to ghosts, but they were still a threat. Apparently Danny thought otherwise.

"So why are you telling us all this?" asked Kwan carefully. Maybe they could negotiate, reason with the ghost to get it to leave them alone. And then contact every ghost fighter imaginable to devise a plan.

But Technus had no such thing in mind. He pointed dramatically at Danny. "You have distracted me again! But this'll be the very last time, child. I will now take your solar panels and- I am not telling you the rest of my plans."

"Wait!" cried Danny, but the ghost didn't listen. It turned intangible and slid out of the Space Station, in the direction of his ghost-made satellite. Danny whirled around and shot towards the command console.

"Maybe we can emit some kind of frequency, I know one that's horrible-sounding to ghosts," said Danny for Kwan's benefit. Kwan wracked his brain to think of something, anything they could do, but he didn't have any ghost hunter experience. He had studied what they were made of, how ectoplasm interacted with other substances, what energy it gave off and could be harnessed. But he steered clear of the post-human consciousness ghosts were made of.

Danny's fingers flitted from key to switch to button, but he pressed none of them. He kept his gaze locked onto the computer screen. Finally he cursed and pushed away from the console. "We can't emit a pulse. But maybe, maybe, we can-"

"No ghost hunting weapons on board?" asked Kwan. He ran his hands through his hair as he thought, but his mind drew a very finite blank. Ever since he was a child he had been calm in dire circumstances, something which had benefited him very well during astronaut training. But even he began to despair.

A bang against the side of the station made both of them jump.

"No, though my dad tried to sneak the thermos on board. I really wish he had succeeded."

Kwan filed the strange name away under 'Fenton-crazy'. Who used a thermos as a weapon? Could you bludgeon a ghost to second death with it?

Danny copied Kwan's gesture of running his hands through his hair. Technus chose that moment to pop his head in again. Just his head, saw Kwan, he kept his body outside the Space Station.

"Where do you keep your nickel-hydrogen batteries?" asked Technus in a surprisingly pleasant voice. "I need them to power my satellite before I steal your solar panels."

Kwan's mouth hit the floor. The ghost had the audacity to ask them for directions? Without those batteries the power would fail, and power was the Space Station's most critical resource. They'd be dead in twenty minutes if Technus got a hold of their batteries.

"Get out of here!" yelled Danny at Technus.

"Temper, temper," replied Technus. His head disappeared again. Kwan didn't know whether to be relieved or fearful that Technus was gone. That probably meant that he was currently combing out the station.

"So we can't fight, we can't stop him, and if he finds the batteries we'll be dead in minutes. I think it's time for the escape pods," said Kwan. He really, really didn't want to leave the Station, essentially dooming it, but he had no control over the situation. When the Space Station was built, nobody at NASA thought that the astronauts would have to defend it from a ghost attack.

"No," said Danny flatly. "There's one thing I can do. Get me my bio-suit, a helmet and oxygen supply."

The steel in Danny's voice was back and Kwan obeyed. As he floated away he heard Danny mutter "knew it'd come to this." Faster than he'd ever moved before he propelled himself through the station and got out the items from Zarya. When he got back inside the command center he saw that Danny had grabbed a screwdriver and a wrench, for some reason.

"You know when you asked me a couple of days ago if the ectoplasm in my blood had done anything else to me?" asked Danny.

"Yeah, but what does that have to do-"

"I … kind of lied through my teeth then."

Kwan narrowed his eyes at Danny. At such a crucial time they couldn't afford any dishonesty. He knew he should've reported the incident to NASA. Maybe the ectoplasm had somehow attracted that Tech nus-ghost, or maybe Danny himself was … a…

The scene in front of him stopped his train of thought in a daring daylight robbery.

Without another word Danny somehow created a ring of light around his middle, which split and traveled across his torso and waist, leaving a black suit in its wake. The NASA overalls made way for a hazmat suit with a white belt, boot and gloves. And a very familiar symbol sitting proudly on Danny's chest.

Apparently Danny was dead. Had been for quite a while.

Kwan gaped at the appearance of the famous specter for a few seconds before he blurted out the first thought to cross his mind. "But you have blood," he said. "Ghosts don't have blood."

While explaining Danny put the suit on, struggling with the skintight material for a second. He plucked the oxygen tank and helmet from where they floated when Kwan had let go of them.

"I'm not a ghost. Not a full one, I'm half-ghost. Danny Phantom, Danny Fenton, see? Short version - had an accident with the ghost portal when I was fourteen, got ghost powers. Been fighting ghosts ever since, with the whole Disasteroid thing NASA noticed me and offered me the astronaut training."

Kwan shoved aside all the questions and focused on the situation at hand. Another useful skill learned during astronaut training: repair first, ask questions later. Preferably while back on Earth and with at least three witnesses present.

"Alright, what else do you need?" asked Kwan. Danny pointed at the oxygen tank.

"Get this on my back."

"Got it." Kwan helped secure the tank on Danny's back and hooked it up to the proper lines. He noticed that the structure of Danny's body had changed. He no longer felt solid flesh beneath his hands with an underlying bone structure, but it felt more like he was squeezing someone's upper arm fat. It had the same bounciness and softness, although underneath it there was definitely some structure. It was just better hidden.

"Done," he announced. Danny put the helmet on and turned around. Kwan could hear the oxygen hiss into the helmet when the tubes connected. Danny's eyes glowed and strands of his trademark white hair were mashed against his face. Yup, he was still Danny Phantom, somehow. World renowned hero and savior of Amity Park, multiple times. And the world.

"Thanks. Come on, we've got to decompress the airlock, no wait. I'm an idiot." Danny tried to slap himself in the forehead but hit his helmet instead. "I'm a ghost. Intangibility."

"You _are_ a ghost?" asked Kwan, but Danny didn't answer. Instead he became see-through. And he became harder to look at, as if he wasn't really occupying that space at the time. He easily slid through the outer hull and out of Kwan's visual reach. Kwan had never seen a ghost do that up close. It looked effortless and weird, like a mirage. Your common sense tells you that going through a wall is impossible, just like seeing a city in the air, but your eyes tell you that yes, it is quite possible.

"Good luck," said Kwan to empty air. He hoped that Danny would be able to beat that ghost. But he was Danny Phantom, and Phantom was incredibly strong. Was Danny that strong when he was a human as well? Wait, he had said he was half-human, so he was a kind of hybrid between the supernatural and the natural world. An accident?

Kwan manipulated the camera controls to see if he could follow the battle taking place in outer space. He breathed out an unconsciously held in breath when he saw Phantom fly towards Technus and his satellite. The ghost was carrying armfuls of their batteries towards the technological abomination. The countdown had started.

Oxygen wouldn't really be a problem in the foreseeable future. If Elektron, the oxygen generator, gave out, there were still bottled oxygen canisters and the Vika oxygen generator. The problem lay in the heat the station put out. Since it was well-insulated, nearly every watt the infinite amount of machines inside the station put out also turned into heat. No electricity meant no power for the pumps circulating water and ammonia through the walls, which carried the heat off into the radiators exposed to the coldness of space.

No pumps meant the ammonia would freeze, and the station would heat up within minutes. Kwan could hold out for maybe twenty minutes before the heat would become unbearable. Since they were currently eclipsed by the Earth, meaning they weren't catching any sunlight on the solar panels, their batteries were their life power.

Technus had just taken about a fourth of them in his hands, but several things danced behind him in the black void. Kwan cocked his head as he tried to make out the shapes, and then wished he hadn't. Technus had taken all of their batteries and was using some kind of telekinetic power to float them over to his satellite.

Kwan swallowed heavily, but then smiled when Danny came into the picture. He didn't bother with any pleasantries and grabbed one of the green-glowing batteries. It grew fangs and tried to bite him, to Kwan's horror. Danny let it go and the battery rejoined the parade, but Danny now had Technus full attention. With the batteries still in the galaxy's weirdest conga line dancing towards the satellite the ghost faced Danny. His mouth opened and closed, but of course there was no sound in space. Technus released the batteries he had been holding and they too floated away.

The battle began.

Kwan could hardly call it a battle though. It was more like a carnage.

He knew that Danny Phantom was a powerful ghost, he'd seen him take on ghosts five times his size and twice his firing power, and he'd came out on top. But Phantom had matured and apparently his powers along with him.

With precise blasts Danny carved the satellite up into itty bitty chunks. He froze the debris in clear ice and then blasted them towards the Earth, where they would burn up in the atmosphere. Kwan felt glad for that, because there was already enough junk in their orbit. They didn't need another defunct satellite cluttering up precious space and threatening other satellites.

Technus tried to fight back to defend the satellite, but a single blast from Danny sent him spinning head over heels. He waved his arms about and the possessed batteries jerked to live. They broke their conga line and headed towards Danny, who once again became see-through. The fangs the batteries now sported bit into nothing as they passed through him.

Technus used the diversion to sic the remains of the satellite on Danny while at the same time commanding the batteries to turn around and try again. But thankfully Danny was no fool. He remained intangible, blasting away at the satellite, dividing it in a creative way.

Kwan noticed that he tried to avoid hitting the batteries. They were going to need those to survive this.

The technological ghost also began blasting away, although he aimed at Danny. Kwan held his breath as a blinding ghost ray headed towards Danny, but he threw up a shield to deflect the blasts. The satellite was almost gone by now, just bits and pieces remained floating in space.

And then Kwan noticed the other satellite on a collision course with the International Space Station.

* * *

"Danny!" yelled Kwan out instinctually. He had to fire the thrusters, had to get the space station out harm's way, had to, had to-

His hands sought out the communication software on the nearest laptop. He slapped the emergency contact button and waited a few precious seconds as the protocol sought out all activated communication devices.

"Danny! There's another satellite!" yelled Kwan into the microphone the second he saw the red light turn green.

"'-upid ghost, always messing up my- Yowch!" Danny's voice crackled over the radio. His pained remark probably had to do with the volume on the emergency broadcast. On the camera Kwan saw that Danny glanced backwards at the Space Station. "Come again?" asked Danny.

"There's another satellite about to ram us, seven o'clock," summarized Kwan. The second satellite was as much a junk heap as the first one, but it sported two wicked-looking prongs. If those things bored into the Space Station, it would not bode well for its survival. It hurtled towards Kwan with frightening speed, its metal hull reflecting the green blasts from the raging ghost battle.

"I see it," said Danny. He turned around to blast the second satellites in equally small pieces, but a ghost ray from Technus in his back caught him off guard. His ball of green energy sailed off into space harmlessly.

"Oh no," Kwan heard Danny say. He saw why when Danny turned around again to face Technus. Oxygen was escaping from his oxygen tank in a white cloud of gas. Technus' blast had penetrated the metal enough for it to buckle under the pressure and release a tiny amount of gas into the vacuum. But the small hole quickly turned into a big one thanks to the internal pressure and lack of external pressure. Kwan heard Danny gasp for air.

At the same time the second satellite was just seconds away from ramming the International Space Station. Technus was once again laughing soundlessly at his perfectly-executed two-pronged attack. Kwan wished he had a ghost weapon at hand, anything to wipe the smug grin off the ghost's face. But all he could do was watch as the dangerous satellite drifted closer, propelled by old discarded rockets once left in orbit.

There was no time to fire up the thrusters, no time to decompress the affected areas, nothing. He was going to die in space. He closed his eyes in resignation and hoped that Danny could make it back to Earth somehow.

He tensed all over his body as the two satellites collided with a dull 'thud'. It was far less violent than he had expected, and after a second or three without any violent decompression he dared open one eye.

The satellite was completely encased in ice, its prongs included. That had dulled the impact enough to stop the sharp prongs from penetrating. Slivers of ice floated away from the impact.

"Got it… just in time…" gasped Danny over the radio. "Any… leaks?"

Kwan dared to breathe out and called up the sensors reporting the station's well-being. He slapped the comm button again when several dials descended into the red.

"There are two breaches in the outer hull. Trying to seal them."

He worked frantically to seal the hatches from a distance. The shaken computer was sluggish to respond, but finally it told him that the doors were closed.

And then Technus' satellite rammed them a second time.

Kwan heard a cry of frustration from Danny and he couldn't blame the man. That ghost had perfected the art of trolling and had elevated it to a whole new level: trolling in space. The readouts showed more oxygen leaks and Kwan felt his blood run cold. This time he couldn't seal the doors by computer. He'd have to get there and do it manually, all without the ghost ramming them a third time. What the hell was Danny _doing_ out there?

He looked up at the screen and frowned when Danny was waving his arms about. He heard Danny's rough gasps over the radio, with bursts of muttered words he had time nor energy to make out. It looked like Danny had a plan, but it was one which stumped Kwan.

Kwan was still looking at the screen when something tore the universe apart. A sickly swirling green light emanated from an apparent crack in the universe. Danny's arm waving approached a windmill kind of dedication and the crack grew and grew, showing more and more swirling green. Kwan had seen something like this once.

It was a portal to the Ghost Zone.

Kwan turned back to trying to close the doors to preserve all the oxygen he could, shutting off life support in order to keep the oxygen inside the unbreached tanks. It came as a surprise to him when the green light grew stronger, filtering in through the windows instead of just through the screen.

"What are you doing?" demanded Kwan from Danny. The answer came in wrenching bursts of breathing. Danny was losing oxygen too fast.

"Ghost Zone… Safe, air…"

The portal to the Ghost Zone was barely big enough to fit the Space Station through, but somehow Danny stretched the portal to accommodate the size. The green light grew incredibly strong and it was the last thing Kwan saw before Danny positioned himself behind the International Space Station inside and pushed it inside.


	3. Chapter 3

The sudden return of gravity smacked Kwan against the floor, hitting his head hard on the command console. But gravity didn't only take hold of Kwan, it took hold of the entire Space Station. Once Danny pushed it completely through the portal it tipped over and began its free-fall.

Kwan had no idea if the Ghost Zone had a floor, but if it did, he'd be friends with it pretty soon. The rapid descent actually lifted him off the ground in a parody of microgravity and he barely had time to utter a prayer before the metal of the Space Station creaked ominously and the descent slowed. Kwan smacked into the floor a second time, missing the command console this time.

Over the radio he heard Danny grunt in effort. Kwan realized that the half-ghost was the sole reason for the continued existence of the Space Station. Sadly, the Space Station was built to float indefinitely into space. It had thrusters for emergency maneuvers, but was otherwise as immobile as a chunk of dirt.

With a gentle jolt Danny laid the man-made satellite on the ground. Kwan groaned as his body responded to the sudden return of gravity with a blinding headache, thanks to the blood rushing to his head. He felt weak and dizzy and his limbs were slow to respond. With the blood pounding in his ears he tried to get up, but it took him three tries to even lift his head. His teeth hurt, his ears hurt and it felt like someone had just pulled his wisdom teeth out, his jaw ached that much. He shook out his arms and legs before attempting another try. He failed again in getting up, although he got a lot further this time.

He just sunk back onto the ground when Danny floated through the wall, his helmet clutched under one arm. The ruptured oxygen tank had wounded him and Kwan saw green ectoplasm drip down the bio-suit. He hoped that the wound wasn't too severe. He had no idea how to treat a ghost, he had only trained on humans.

"Hey," croaked Danny. He sagged down next to Kwan and put the helmet onto the floor before joining Kwan in admiring the part of the Space Station they could now legitimately call 'ceiling'.

Kwan saw that Danny closed his green eyes and took long, deep breaths. He didn't know ghosts had to breathe, or maybe that was just Danny. The two rings appeared at Danny's waist and once again travelled up and down his body, taking the black bio-suit along in the transformation. Danny once again wore the NASA jumpsuit. Danny's pained face remained the same, however, and now his breathing had grown shuddering.

Once again Kwan attempted to get up. With shaking legs he managed to get up, using the command console as his crutch. He had to get medical supplies, both for himself and for Danny. The lack of oxygen had hurt Danny, although he hoped it was nothing pure oxygen couldn't cure. As for himself, all he needed was some exercise to strengthen his bones and muscles again and some time for the fluids in his body to get used to the gravity and stop floating towards his head. He hadn't been in space long enough for atrophy to set in, but he felt weak nonetheless as he tore the medical kit from its holder on the wall.

He lurched back towards Danny and fell to his knees next to him. He had to think long and hard before the memory where the oxygen mask was located inside the kit emerged. He shook his head to clear the muzzy thoughts from it, but that only worsened the headache. It felt like space sickness all over again, hopefully without the vomit this time.

He tapped Danny on the shoulder and handed him the oxygen mask and small tank of pure oxygen. Danny threw Kwan a grateful look as he strapped the mask to his face. His breaths came easier now, and within minutes had returned to normal. Kwan spent those minutes popping some painkillers, chewing them into pulp before swallowing. He hated to deplete their medical supplies, but there was no way he could function with the killer headache he sported, along with the myriad of problems the sudden return of gravity introduced.

He let his head fall back on the cold metal of the communication console. The adrenalin was starting to wear off and he felt the full extent of his aches and pains throbbing all over his body. He wanted to sleep for three days until the pain in his teeth and ears subsided, and he simply felt really, really tired.

The geek Danny, loser in high school and probably not popular in college was somehow Danny Phantom, had been the famous ghost kid for … a while now, his brains refused to do calculations right now. And now they were in the Ghost Zone, home of all the ghosts which haunted Amity Park and other cities all across the world.

And Danny Fenton was Danny Phantom. The man lying next to him, his blue eyes focused on the ceiling and taking deep, even breaths had just transported them from the cold emptiness of space into another dimension, by tearing the fabric of reality apart with his bare hands. The man who called his wife five times a week, who won every farting contest they had, the man who was afraid to have children was a world-famous superhero.

"What?" asked Danny as he lifted the oxygen mask from his face. His eyes focused on Kwan and Kwan realized that he had been staring at Danny.

" _You're_ Danny Phantom," replied Kwan.

"Well, somebody had to be."

Danny worked himself into a sitting position and lifted the oxygen mask from his face. He took a couple of quick breaths, as if to test the air, but then settled into a normal breathing rhythm as his body adjusted to breathing just 20% oxygen instead of 100%.

"How're you feeling?" asked Danny gently, his eyes roving over the opened painkiller bottle. Kwan shrugged.

"As if I just came back from a month long space mission. You?"

Danny looked at his injured hand. "Apart from this, far better than expected."

Kwan groaned as he reached towards a roll of gauze to help Danny bandage his hand, but a gentle "stop" from Danny made him sag back against the pleasant cool of the communication console.

"Being a half-ghost has some advantages," said Danny as he took a single band-aid from the medical kit. "I don't get space sickness and if I get hurt when I'm a ghost, the injuries are far less severe when I turn into a human."

Kwan frowned at that. How in the world did that work? Bruised tissue was bruised tissue, whether it was made of ectoplasm or human flesh. The same with sliced, burnt and cut-off tissue. Before he could ask Danny to elaborate the man closed the medical kit and stood up.

"Whoa," he said as he wobbled a bit. He lifted a hand to his head as if to steady it and shook it experimentally. "Head rush. Major head rush. I think I need to-"

Danny also sagged back against a console. Apparently he wasn't as immune as he liked to think, thought Kwan with an undertone of satisfaction. It had been annoying to see Danny take to microgravity like a fish to the water. But his frequent ghost-related flying would explain that, along with why he wasn't that bothered when he got stuck in a dead spot. There were no dead spots for him, he could fly.

"This is the Ghost Zone, right? As in, we're actually in the dimension where ghosts live," asked Kwan. Danny nodded slowly. He opened his mouth to say something but Kwan cut him off.

"Where are we? Inside the Ghost Zone, I mean. Is this a secure location?"

This time Kwan allowed Danny the time to answer. But from Danny's frown he could already tell he wasn't going to like the answer.

"I haven't really looked at our surroundings yet, but right now I don't know where we are. I've put the ISS on an empty floating island. I hope it isn't too damaged, but I couldn't hold on to it any longer. God, I'm so _stupid_!"

The outburst came out of nowhere and Kwan was a bit taken aback. He knew Danny had a temper, but he was pretty good at controlling it. But now Danny punched the nearest metal console and to Kwan's horror it dented.

"I should've seen the second satellite coming. Technus used to be easy to beat but since he's been working with Skulker he's learned a few tricks. Stupid, stupid, stupid!"

Each 'stupid' was punctuated by a fist hitting the metal and more dents sprung up.

"Hey, hey, calm down," interrupted Kwan. "I didn't see it either, and I was just sitting here, watching you fight. If anything, I should've been the one who minded our surroundings, not you! So please, _stop hitting the console_."

"No, ghosts are _my_ responsibility," snapped Danny. To Kwan's dismay his blue eyes flashed into his ghostly green ones before receding back into blue. "I had an excellent view of everything around us, I could've - should've seen it. I was having too much fun destroying the satellite."

Kwan pushed himself off the floor and got up, wobbling only slightly. He extended one hand out to Danny, fighting the rush of blood to his head. He saw spots dance a complicated tango in front of his retina, but he refused to back down.

"Could have, should have, doesn't matter now. It happened and we should check our surroundings, see if there are twenty angry ghosts on the other side of the door. Come on."

"Knowing my luck, the Fright Knight is waiting on the other side of that door," muttered Danny, but he accepted Kwan's hand and got to his feet in a less-than-smooth motion. "Alright, I'll go outside and see what's going on. You stay here."

"No," said Kwan immediately and crossed his arms. "You've risked your life enough for one day, it's my turn now."

"But _you_ don't have ghost powers," argued Danny. " _You_ don't get to go outside and see if every ghost I've ever fought is waiting for us."

Kwan didn't deign to answer that one and headed towards Pirs, the nearest air-lock. He no longer needed to pressurize or depressurize it, so after some fiddling with the manual override he swung the door open, Danny's body moving with him like a shadow.

It wasn't Kwan's first look into the Ghost Zone, but it was his first with him smack-dab in the middle of it.

The first thing he noticed was that there was no horizon. It looked like he was back in space, only this time green bits floated about, along with doors as far as he could see. The doors were the only indication that this was a three-dimensional world and not a picture plastered across a screen. The doors bobbed about in an invisible current, with green strands of ectoplasm seemingly going against the current.

But that was just the backdrop. Danny had put the International Space Station down on a floating island. One module hovered over the edge, but the island was longer than it was wide, about three hundred foot across. The edge of the island was about two hundred and fifty feet from where Kwan was standing.

Thankfully no ghosts waited for them, so Kwan carefully stepped onto the purple grass. It crunched underneath his feet like real grass and suddenly Kwan wondered how any plant life could grow here. There was no sun, no rain, only ectoplasm. Which meant that the grass was made out of ectoplasm too, somehow mimicking Earth grass. Or maybe Earth grass mimicked Ghost Zone grass, the link between both worlds was still the subject of much speculation and research.

"Unreal," breathed Kwan. He took some more wobbly steps and was nearly brained by a door. It floated past him with inches to spare and Kwan instinctively ducked. The purple door was oblivious to the astronaut-turned-ghost-zone-naut and calmly drifted onwards on its invisible current.

Danny walked up to Kwan and stood next to him, hands clasped on his back.

"Welcome to the Ghost Zone. Usually I'd give you a tour, but I have no clue where we are, to be honest. But at least we're safe from Technus."

Kwan half-turned towards Danny. "But don't most of Phantom's - your enemies live here?"

"Yep," answered Danny cheerfully. "Which is why we have to find a safe spot as fast as possible."

Without waiting for an answer Danny called upon those rings of light again to transform him into the famous ghost boy - man. He was definitely a man. Kwan remembered Danny Phantom as a slim ghost, forever locked into battle with various threats to the city (and himself). All these years later he had grown up.

Danny stripped out of the bio-suit and hung it alongside the Orlan spacesuits inside the Pirs module.

He was still slim, but he filled out the hazmat suit in a way the young Phantom had not. And apparently his suit grew along with him, because he wore the identical one to when he was young, logo and all. Could ghosts even change clothes?

While all this flitted through Kwan's mind Danny pushed off and flew in a small circle around the island. He looked around in all directions, stopping here and there and lifting a hand above his eyes as if that could help him see through the green swirls of ectoplasm obscuring part of the scenery like green fog. Maybe he could, Kwan had no idea. At one spot Danny stayed a long time, his ghost tail bobbing back and forth. It had to be weird to have no legs anymore, mused Kwan.

Finally Danny floated down to eye level, but kept off the grass. He shook his head with a look of regret. "Sorry, can't say that I recognize any part of the Ghost Zone. I thought that over there," Danny pointed at the spot where he had hovered for a long time, "might be the Swirling Vortex of Infinite Pain in the distance, but it's going the wrong way."

"Alright," said Kwan with a nod. He was trained for impossible situations like this, he could handle it. First things first: they had to take stock of what they had.

"Alright," said Kwan again. He pointed at himself first. "Let's be honest, I'm not doing too well. I'm dizzy, weak and it'll take me at least two days, maybe three before I'm relatively back to normal. How are you holding up?"

"Brutal honesty?" asked Danny rhetorically. He too pointed at himself. "I'll need a day to recover, although my ghost form is pretty unaffected, save for some pain in my ears. The moment I turn back into a human I need to rest, though. And I don't think I'll be able to transform back immediately."

Kwan cocked his head at Danny. It was a first for him to converse with a floating person and it was disconcerting. "How much energy does transforming take?"

"Not much. 'Human' is the standard, in a manner of speaking, so when my ghost form is exhausted I turn back, whether I want to or not. It's the more complicated ghost powers which drain my energy."

With a sigh Kwan pointed at the ground. "I don't mean to be rude, but could you come down? My neck is starting to hurt and I've already got a headache."

With a sheepish grin Danny lowered himself to the ground, turning his ghost tail back into proper legs and feet again before touching down. Kwan was dying to know how he did that, how he did all of those amazing things, but now was not the time. Come to think of amazing things…

"Thanks. I guess one of the 'complicated ghost powers' is tearing a hole between the Ghost Zone and Earth. And you can't do that right now, or you'll pass out."

Danny tapped the ground with one white boot while clasping his hands behind his back again, not quite looking Kwan in the eyes.

"Well, no, but… it's technical. Bottom line is, I can't."

"Dumb it down for me," demanded Kwan. He had to know why that avenue of plans was barred off, or else he could never think up new things. In space, he knew all about the Space Station, about which button did what, about the communication protocols and how to shower in micro gravity. But here he had to completely rely on Danny's knowledge. It was no doubt vast, thanks to Danny's years as a ghost-fighting… ghost, but this revelation had put a strain on Kwan's trust in Danny. If he had kept that a secret, what else did he have hidden in the fists behind his back? He had only shown one fist and Kwan feared the moment Danny opened the other one.

"Getting into the Ghost Zone is easy. It's getting out that's harder. It requires the same amount of power, but I have no control over where we end up. I'm only half-ghost, I can't sense the ley-lines like full ghosts can."

Kwan raised his eyebrows. Ley-lines? An idea struck him.

"What if you tear a hole in the same spot as we went in? We could repair the damaged modules and get the station back out there, before it suffers any more damage. Or before _we_ suffer any damage."

Danny's agitation was written all over his face and he began to float again, though not as high this time. He paced with his feet dangling over the purple grass. "I wish it was that simple. But I'm sorry, by now that spot is gone. Like I said, it's technical, but we have to get to a safe spot first before I can explain. Trust me on this."

Danny held the other fist tight against his back and Kwan didn't like it. But if Danny refused to talk, he could hardly bully him into spilling his green guts. He had done that enough in high school.

"Help," said Kwan suddenly. "We should call for help."

He turned around and began to head inside, but Danny's "we can't" made him stop.

"Why can't we call for help?" Kwan demanded, whirling back around.

"We don't have the equipment to filter out the spectral noise. All they'll hear is a bunch of ghosts going 'whooo-ooo' ." Danny wriggled his fingers above his head to mimic a scary ghost noise. In his hollow voice it was scarier than it should be.

"Can we build something to filter it out?"

"I've never learned how, and we don't have the necessary equipment. You need some ectoplasm-negating material, and that's in very short supply inside the ghost zone."

"Can we take the station with us?" Kwan switched tracks. If they couldn't call for help, they'd have to move towards any help. The ISS was safe where it was now, but they couldn't just abandon it. They'd never find it back in this dimension and a smart ghost could quickly turn it into a weapon. He wasn't going to risk leaving it behind for even a second, but as it was right now, they couldn't move it.

"Right now, no. I'm too weak." Kwan could appreciate Danny's honesty, but it was a bummer. "Maybe in two to three days I'm strong enough to lift it, but even then I won't be able to move it very far. But…"

Danny stopped talking and fired a blast at the ground. The purple grass blackened and brown dirt spread out.

"We can move the island," said Danny. If I carve off enough, I think it'll be manageable if we use the ecto-converter. And build a propulsion system."

"Well, there's plenty of fuel around," said Kwan with a smile. His smile fell when he realized the second condition. "But we don't have any materials to build a propulsion system with. Unless you want to scavenge the thrusters from the ISS."

Danny stopped floating and settled back onto the ground with a firm 'thump'. "That's not what I had in mind. See all those doors?" He didn't wait for confirmation, because the moment anyone entered the ghost zone, there were three things which drew attention: green ectoplasm, black void and purple, purple doors.

"They lead to… what did Tuck call them again… pocket dimensions. Each one contains a universe of its own. Some doors lead to ghost lairs, some to the past, present or future. Although I've also ended up in space once, and back in the ghost zone too. If we need parts, we can nick them from those dimensions."

"But we can't tell what's behind what door, right?"

Danny shook his head. "No, I'm afraid not. But steer clear of the red ones. And the ones marked with an eye."

"An eye?" asked Kwan. What did an eye have to do with danger?

"The Observers have marked that door, so it's best to keep out of it altogether. They usually have their reasons."

Kwan let the remark about the Observers drop. They had to get a move on, and standing around discussing Ghost Zone ghosts all day wasn't going to help them. He was very curious, but it all had to wait.

"We should take a nap first," suggested Kwan. His body wholeheartedly agreed with him, even if Danny visibly disagreed. But then the half-ghost sighed.

"You're probably right. I feel like I just flew halfway across the continent. Trust me, that takes a lot out of you. I'll keep the first watch."

Kwan firmly shook his head. "No. We're going to need your… abilities if a ghost wants to take the station. You sleep first, I'll wake you in, how long should each of us sleep? Three hours?"

"Sounds like more hours of uninterrupted sleep than I usually get," replied Danny, but he didn't disagree with Kwan's reasoning. He walked inside the airlock and held the door open for Kwan.

"It's better if no ghost spots a human standing outside. Humans aren't exactly common in the ghost zone."

"Good idea. I'll wake you if a ghost decides to sniff around here and see why a space-faring object lies on a floating island in the Ghost Zone."

Kwan closed the hatch behind him and followed Danny into the other modules of the ship. Danny was still Phantom, and it looked like he intended to stay that way. Kwan wondered how much control Danny had over the whole process. Could he change whenever he wanted to, or did he have to do something first to change from human into a real ghost. Did he _die_ every time he changed?

Danny interrupted his thoughts as he spoke while he floated upwards to take their sleeping bags down from the wall-turned-ceiling. "We should be alright for a little while. The ISS is hardly the weirdest thing you can find inside the Ghost Zone."

Kwan made an inquiring noise as he took the offered sleeping bag from Danny.

"Real life objects from all kinds of time periods tend to gravitate towards the Ghost Zone. I've seen fridges, some kind of futuristic hovercraft, one of those old spearheads made from stone and an entire wooden airplane straight out of 1900-something. One 'deserted' space station should go unnoticed, at least for a little while."

Danny laid his sleeping bag out on the least-covered part of the floor, with Kwan's bag acting as a mattress. There were still bumps and ridges on the floor, but it was the most comfortable place they could find. Danny crawled inside his sleeping bag, not even bothering to undress. Could he even undress out of that hazmat suit?

"Three hours, right?" confirmed Danny one more time, but Kwan saw that even now his eyes started to close.

"Yeah," replied Kwan. He regretfully walked away from the Place of Sleep, something which his eyes told him he was going to need very soon. He turned around at an odd sound. The two rings of light which had brought the remarkable secret of Phantom into his life appeared again and changed Danny from his otherworldly appearance back to the black-haired man Kwan knew. He didn't know if that was a good or bad sign.

With Danny resting he used the spare time to gather up the materials they needed on their trip to make a propulsion system. A hand held computer, definitely. Some screwdrivers in case they needed to _liberate_ any technology. And of course the basics of food, water and first-aid. Maybe a spare set of clothes.

After finding two bags they could use he gathered the materials in there, selected a few supplies from the first-aid kit and packed the whole thing as tight as possible.

After he had done that he had time to think. But he needed to keep himself busy to stop himself falling asleep, so he put the batches of ectoplasm away and tidied up the laboratory. And to think that a week ago they were worried they were going to run out of ectoplasm! Now they were in a whole dimension where everything was made of the stuff.

And geeky, scrawny Danny was Phantom. That truth kept pulling the chair out from underneath his descending body. By now he could conclude it was no trick and no lie. Somehow Danny had turned into a half-ghost in their freshman year and had defended Amity Park against countless ghost attacks. He'd even saved the world! Well, him and about a million other ghosts, but it was he who came up with the whole idea of turning the Earth intangible.

Kwan remembered laying tubes all over Amity Park and its surrounding cities. He'd worked tirelessly, using his strong body to help wherever he could. He barely slept during those tiring days, but he still remembered watching the broadcast, live from the North Pole. He had watched as Phantom's jet crashed into the mountain and at that moment he was sure he was going to die. But then the white-haired ghost flew out of the portal, leading a massive ghost group.

And then it had all gone tingly when the entire world around him turned blue. Out of pure curiosity he had walked through the nearest wall, but was back in front of the television as he watched the Disasteroid shoot through the Earth, on its way to who knows where. He had cheered along with the entire world. The live broadcast shut off when Phantom descended onto the ice of the North Pole, grinning the widest grin he could.

That Phantom was the same boy who was now sleeping soundly (and snoring slightly) as he recovered from his ordeal of getting the ISS inside the Ghost Zone and safely onto an island.

As an astronaut he could handle stress and surprises very well. When Danny transformed he had been bowled over for a second, but then he quickly adapted to the situation. But with this forced downtime his mind had time to catch up to the thoughts his subconscious had already been serving him.

He had bullied world-famous Danny Phantom in high school. How had Danny kept it a secret for so long? Kwan had never even suspected a thing. True, Phantom had been sighted a lot around the school, but so had other ghosts. Phantom could disappear without a trace and appeared to grow from a small boy into an adult man. The ghost experts had put that down to the power he held, which matured along with him. Other ghosts sometimes changed their forms, albeit they did it at once, while Phantom did it gradually.

All these and other theories Kwan had read when he had been a 'phan', as Paulina had put it. He had grown over his hero worship when he enrolled in the NASA training program, but Phantom was something of a childhood hero to him.

And didn't the saying go: never meet your heroes?


	4. Chapter 4

He dreamt of green, of danger and his niece caught in the trap of a ghost. The hand that shook him awake was almost welcome. Except that his brain felt fuzzy and his body heavy, like he had been drugged. His headache was a lot more manageable now, noticed Kwan when he opened his eyes. And looked straight into baby blue ones. He yelped involuntarily and scrambled backwards, his hands already balling into fists thanks to years of football training, tensing up his whole body to defend.

"Looks like you're awake now," said Danny, leaning back. He got up and made some room for Kwan.

"Yes, I am _now_ ," replied Kwan. His heartbeat had skyrocketed and that made his headache slowly crawl back.

"I tried to wake you three times now," said Danny. "I thought you'd slipped into a coma or something. But you're awake now, so it looks like you're alright. I hope."

"I feel alright," said Kwan. "A whole lot better, actually."

He rolled the sleeping bags into a small package and looked around for the bags they were taking with them.

"No wonder, you slept for ten hours. Which is kinda my fault."

"Ten hours?!"

Danny sheepishly looked everywhere but at Kwan. "I kinda... fell back asleep after you woke me up."

"Oh," Kwan said intelligently. "That wasn't very smart," he followed up. Danny nodded.

"I know, I feel stupid. But it happened. No ghost attacked us, though."

"That's the upside. What's the situation outside? Do you recognize it yet?"

Danny shook his head. "Afraid not. Not even a single reference point. You do know that the Ghost Zone is huge, right?"

Kwan nodded. "Yeah, I know." He wriggled out of the sleeping bag and cracked his knuckles. Then he turned to Danny. Fenton. Phantom. Still hard to believe, at any rate. But now that he knew The Big Secret, they could salvage the situation, somehow. Hopefully. Because there was no way he was going to phone NASA and tell them that their billion dollar space station was lost in another dimension. That wasn't just career suicide, that was nuclear career bombardment.

"Alright, found a good door then?" Kwan asked. Danny nodded and pointed at something on the ceiling. Or maybe beyond the ceiling.

"If you agree to let me fly us to the doors, we can get started," Danny said. Kwan took another long look at the creepy green of the Ghost Zone, but he knew they had no choice. He gathered up the backpacks with the equipment and handed one to Danny before slinging his own over his shoulder.

"Let's get moving," Kwan said. Danny gave a half-smile and lead the way out the door. They carefully shut it behind them, but since it was a man-made material, it was little use. Any ghost could phase through the heavy metal door. Still, it felt a bit safer to close it.

Without warning Danny called the two rings which turned him into Phantom into existence. With that little lightshow he turned into the world-famous ghost fighter, right in front of Kwan's eyes. Kwan rationally knew that Danny was Phantom, but he still hadn't really digested it. His first reaction was to relax. Phantom would take care of things, like he always did. Supernatural things didn't seem so powerful when Amity Park's protector was there to pummel whatever post-human consciousness threatened the town or its citizens that day.

But Phantom was Danny, scrawny Fenton who could barely pass math or make it through the presidential fitness test. And somehow the geek and the jock were going to fight and find their way back to their Earth, their dimension, their wives and jobs and families.

“How do you usually do this?” asked Kwan as he toed the edge of the floating island, looking up at a floating Danny. He got a puzzled look in return.

“The whole flying thing,” elaborated Kwan. Danny shrugged.

“I can transfer some of my power into another person, making them intangible or invisible… or flight-capable. Only when you touch me though, if you let go lady gravity notices you’ve been cheating on her.”

“Gotcha,” said Kwan. Danny landed next to Kwan and put an arm over his shoulder as if he was about to side-hug him. Kwan’s first instinct was to pull away, drilled into him by football matches. But Danny’s grip was incredibly strong and soon his mind caught up with his muscles. He slung his own arm over Danny’s slim shoulders.

“Ready?” asked Danny and Kwan nodded. Danny felt cold to the touch, albeit not uncomfortably so. It was like… touching a dead body, his mind supplied, but Kwan quickly discarded that thought. Or tried to.

He was distracted by Danny’s body temperature when he felt a weird feeling creep across his body. Before he could ask what it was, Danny launched them into the air and towards a cluster of purple doors.

Flying was tingly, Kwan decided. It was unreal, and he had no idea how to steer or propel himself, Danny did all the work. But he was along for the ride, although it felt like he left his stomach behind on the floating island. There was no wind to speak of, so their flight was strangely clinical. The Ghost Zone was dead silent, with only the soft ‘whoosh’ of doors drifting past. Danny headed towards a purple door with a brass knob, an old-fashioned lock hiding in the shadows below the knob. When they drifted closer Kwan saw that it was made of cheap wood, splinters of it already trying to free themselves from their mold.

“This door?” asked Danny.

“Why not?” answered Kwan. As long as it wasn’t red or had the mark of an eye on it, right?

Danny hovered in front of the door and cautiously opened it, positioning himself between the doorway and Kwan. _Like a true hero_ , shot through Kwan’s head.

Beyond the door was a large room, blue walls stretching around a grey floor. In the middle of the room lay a huge pile of pencils of all colors and sizes, threatening to take over the entire room. They heard scraping sounds coming from behind the pile.

“Is this a ghost’s lair?” whispered Kwan. The scraping sound stopped and Danny called out, “Hello? Is anybody there? We don’t mean you any harm, we’re just looking for-“

A ghost’s head peered around the huge pencil pile. The ghost was green and quite transparent, showing the blue walls through its body. It turned its enormous eyes onto the weird couple floating in front of its door. The ghost waved the pencil and pencil sharpener it held in its tiny fists at the intruders.

“Begone! My work is nearly done!” It stepped closer to Kwan and Danny, brandishing the pencil like a sword. “Foul creatures! My task is nearing completion and then I rest, yes, I rest.”

The ghost looked at the pencil sharpener and began sharpening the pencil again, completely forgetting that two people floated in front of the door to its lair. Kwan saw that with each shave the specter became more transparent. The pile of pencils all had sharp points, perfect to the point of… obsession.

“C’mon, let’s go,” murmured Danny as he softly closed the door. He steered them away from the door and honed in on a new one.

“That ghost is about to fade away, isn’t it?” asked Kwan, but he didn’t wait for an answer from Danny before continuing, “Do you know what happens to ghosts who complete their obsession?”

Danny stopped in front of a new door. This one was purple as well, but sported delicate wood carvings and a large bronze doorknob in the shape of an elephant.

“I don’t know, Kwan. I think that the ectoplasm they’re made of drifts apart, becomes part of the Ghost Zone again. Like when humans die, their atoms become part of the Earth.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” admitted Kwan. He held his breath as Danny opened the door without delay. Would this old door lead to the lair of an old ghost? And if it was old, would it be powerful?

 

XXX

But the door opened into blackness. No, that wasn’t quite right, saw Kwan. Yellow light flooded the base of the blackness, blotting out tiny pinpricks of light scattered across the black. He realized he was looking at the view high above a city.

“Looks like Earth,” said Danny. “Could be a rural village, judging by the lights.”

“By the lights?”

“Yeah,” replied Danny wryly. “When you’ve spent as much time as I have flying above a modern city, you get to know the brightness of the lights. And this looks rural, or old, or maybe this door leads to a third-world country or something.”

“Should we try this or hold out for a more lit area?”

Danny couldn’t shrug as well because of Kwan’s arm slung across his shoulders, but Kwan got the idea.

“Doesn’t hurt to try. As long as we don’t stay too long, the portal should stay open.”

“And you can always create a new one.”

Danny didn’t answer, but simply flew through the portal and headed towards the barely-lit village. Kwan remembered why the Ghost Zone seemed so … dead. The Zone had no wind, no sound, no horizon. But it all slammed back together the moment they dove through the door and Kwan’s eyes watered at the wind shear.

When they got closer to the village Kwan saw why it looked so rural. It _was_ a rural village, but not one in the modern sense of the word. The streets were brown and narrow, and light shone from few houses. Scattered across the roads were tiny dots of light, far not strong enough to be powered by electrical light.

“We’re in the past,” summed Kwan up.

“Looks like it,” replied Danny. He set them down on one of the narrow streets which could qualify as a back alley. It was hard to see in the darkness, but Kwan thought that walls of the houses the back alley connected to were made out of loam. His eyes hadn’t gotten used to the darkness though, so he hoped he was wrong. Because there was no way they were going to find a transformer in this world.

“C’mon, we’ve gotta find a jug,” said Danny. He let the white rings pass over his body and turned a little less inconspicuous. A little, because they still stuck out like sore thumbs with their blue NASA jumpsuits.

Danny peeked around the corner and gestured for Kwan to come closer.

“What do you reckon?” he asked. “16th century? 17th Century?”

In all honesty, Kwan never thought he’d have to evaluate the buildings around him and determine roughly in which century they currently stood in. He hazarded a guess. “16th  century, I think.”

“Me too,” replied Danny. He slipped around the corner, staying close to the wall.

The night sky was dark, darker than they were used to in their light-polluted home town. It had to be late at night, because the streets were deserted. Danny and Kwan walked past rows of houses, all seemingly built out of loam. Stone houses were visible in the distance, but the street ended in a gate. Beyond the gate lay the stone houses. It looked like they had landed in the poor district.

Inside one lit building raucous laughter twirled towards the still-open ghost portal. They heard snippets of songs and two male voices having a shouting match.

“Looks like a bar. We should get inside and buy a mug.”

“With what money?” asked Kwan. Danny pulled a face and walked closer to the bar. He looked around, and Kwan did so too automatically. There was no one around, apart from the people inside the bar. Danny’s head disappeared and Kwan took a step backwards. Where did he- right, Danny was Phantom. But he had no idea that Danny could do ghost-things in human form as well.

Danny’s invisible head peeked around the corner of the bar for a whole minute before he joined Kwan outside the bar.

“Definitely in the past, and I think we’re in England. I can hardly understand them, and that’s not just because of their accents. They use a lot of words I’ve never even heard of. This might get tough.”

Kwan pulled on Danny’s arm, guiding them a bit further away from the open doorway. He feared that any moment now someone would step out and spot the definitely-out-of-place duo.

“Why can’t you just go invisible, get inside and grab a jug? It’s a bar - it’s not like they’re going to miss one small jug. And they can’t even see who did it!”

“No.”

Danny’s answer was sharp and immediate. He frowned at Kwan, but didn’t bother giving an explanation.

“Why not? If I recall correctly, you’ve stolen stuff before as Phantom.”

That made Danny lock up even tighter. He crossed his arms and his frown deepened.

“I was being controlled that time. And as for stealing that jug - I am not Plasmius. He used his ghost powers to steal and make himself rich. I am _nothing_ like him, so I will not grab that jug using my powers.”

Kwan stayed silent for a few moments. “You’ve got some real issues, man,” he sighed. Danny’s frown faltered and a semi-grin appeared.

“You don’t know the half of it. The _other_ half.”

They shared a look over this recently discovered Phantom secret before Kwan turned back to the bar. The level of noise inside grew louder and nobody had stepped out yet, a sure sign that it was not that late in the evening.

“So we’ll need money to buy a mug. Any ideas?”

Danny let his arms slip from their crossed position and he gestured towards the bar. “I’ve got a few…”

XXX

Kwan had been part of the football team for his entire high school career. He had hiked the ball, knew how to tackle and how to run in a zigzag pattern. He had also been appreciative of the cheerleaders, in more ways than one. They could perform athletic feats Kwan could never copy, not if he wanted to keep his bones (and dignity) intact. So he just looked on as the girls flipped and somersaulted through the air, making it look so easy.

The way Danny burst into the bar reminded Kwan of a cheerleader routine. Back handstand, on his feet again, a cartwheel, another back handstand on one hand and Danny finished it off with a somersault. It looked so easy, but Kwan chose to follow Danny into the bar by simply walking.

Side by side they now stood, facing down the momentarily stunned English population.

"Tadaa!" Danny ventured, making a grand gesture. "Tonight, live and in this bar, pub, only, the great, uh, Phantomio and his assistant, Mitsubishi! Prepare to be awed, to be amazed, as we perform illusions you have never seen before!"

Kwan and Danny waited a few seconds for the crowd to react. There were mostly men, with a few women serving the drinks. The pub _stank_ , as did the people, but they looked healthy enough, even if their clothes weren't starch-white. The men cheered and Kwan felt some relief at not having to beat a quick retreat. Both Danny and Kwan couldn't really remember what people thought of stage magic in 16  th  century England, but they seemed appreciative enough. Or maybe it was the beer roaring the approval. At any rate, they weren't tied to a stake with a fire burning underneath yet, so they could give it a shot.

"For my first act, I shall make my assistant disappear. Kw- Mitsubishi, get ready!"

Danny stepped a bit in front of Kwan, and murmured, "Keep holding my hand," before he sent a rush of invisibility Kwan's way. At the same time Danny stepped in front of Kwan and then to the side again. The women in the pub gasped and the men laughed and clapped. Danny made a show of waving his hand through the air right in front of Kwan to show he had disappeared. Danny once again stepped in front of Kwan, made some elaborate moves with his remaining free hand and stepped to the side, lifting the invisibility. The men clapped and whistled.

"For my second act, I need two beers." But none were forthcoming. "Ale? Lager? Pint?" Danny tried. He held up two fingers and pointed at a beer a particularly scruffy-looking man was holding. "Two beer," he enunciated carefully, making eye contact with a woman holding a wooden tray. She got the message and fetched two pewter tankards, filled to the brim with dark liquid and foam. Danny took them and thanked her before handing one to Kwan.

"Mitsubishi, hold it out towards me. Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, I'll now show you that this ... metal jug, is an ordinary metal jug. It's solid," he knocked on it a few times, "it's definitely real. And yet..."

He waved his hand around it a few times and Kwan noticed that it now carried the same blue glow Danny had when he slid through the outer hull of the station. Intangibility then. Kwan held his tankard out and Danny moved his _through_ Kwan's, astonishing the crowd. Danny did it a few more times, coming in from the left, from below, always sliding through.

Then Danny grabbed Kwan's tankard and started juggling with the two, grabbing an empty third from a nearby table. This, the crowd could understand and appreciate more. Danny wasn't as experienced with juggling as he was with intangibility, so five revolutions later he toppled a tankard and beer came gushing out. The men whistled and laughed even harder. Danny caught the remaining two tankards and took a deep bow.

"The great Phantomio, ladies and gents!"

Kwan also bowed to the audience. Danny set the two tankards apart on a table. In this world (or dimension) there wasn't much to be found, but they could use the tankards to store ectoplasm. They needed all the components they could get to create a working ectoplasm-powered engine.

"And now, my greatest illusion. I need complete silence. Sssshhh..." Danny put a finger to his lips to silence the crowd. Kwan shushed the people who still talked, and after thirty seconds every eye was upon Danny. He employed the trick of talking softly in order to create tension, and to keep the people quiet.

"This illusion was taught to me by my father, and he got it from his father's father, and he in turn got it from his father... Gentlemen and ladies, I require complete silence. Because I... am going to ... fly."

The anticipation was high among the crowd. Danny was a good actor, Kwan admitted. The superhero comics delved into the lies and deceit someone had to use to keep a secret identity secret, but this also meant that the person hiding his powers had to get real good at lying. Acting just came with the job.

Kwan wondered how often Danny had lied to him before.

His thoughts were interrupted when Danny began to levitate. He had his eyes shut and his eyebrows showed that he was concentrating deeply, or so he made it seem. Danny let his body drift a foot into the air, and the crowd stayed silent. There were those who stared at the space beneath Danny's dangling feet, and those who made the sign of the cross with their fingers, warding off something unknown. Kwan surmised that nobody had seen an ectoplasmic entity before if they became so frightened at the levitating part. If Danny had burst in here in full Phantom mode, he'd have understood their fear. But then again, it was amazing how quickly humans could get used to things, including floating dead people.

"Out!" one of the men yelled. "Get out!"

"Devilry!" another yelled. More shouts started up when Danny levitated even higher. He opened his eyes and warded off the accusations.

"It's an illusion! A trick! It's _not real_!"

Except that it totally was real. Danny lied like a pro. Kwan jumped forward and bowed deeply. "The great Phantomio, ladies and gentlemen!" He applauded the performance, and here and there people joined in, but most of them stared wide-eyed at Danny as if he would turn into something vile right then and there.

"We should go," Danny suggested and Kwan was hot on his heels. On their way out they grabbed the two tankards standing on the table. "We earned them," Danny said. "I think."

"You don't hear me arguing about it," Kwan said and together they exited the bar, leaving the stunned people behind. The ones who had cried wolf shouted some unintelligible things after them, while some who had clapped whistled loudly to show their appreciation.

"Tough crowd," Danny said, and Kwan couldn't help but chuckle. Danny looked around by habit and when he spotted no one he let the rings overtake him. Kwan took the two tankards and Danny lifted Kwan into the air. "If we're lucky, the portal is still open, or at least the barrier between dimensions is thin."

In silence they looked around and Kwan spotted the green thing first. He pointed at it with a tankard and Danny swiftly took them to the portal. A second later they were once again inside the Ghost Zone. The door swung shut behind them and bobbed away.

"That... well, it wasn't a complete success, nor a complete failure," Danny summed up.

"At least we got jugs to keep the ectoplasm in," Kwan said. "But I have one question." He was interrupted by Danny landing them both safely next to the intact station. Kwan swung his arm a few times to pop his shoulder and stop an annoying ache before he continued. "Why Mitsubishi?"

Danny was quite interested in the nearest door flying by and refused to look Kwan in the eyes. "Ah, I could hardly use your real name, you look Asian, it was the first Asian-sounding name I could think of."

Kwan grinned and made his way to the airlock. "Well, at least you didn't call me ching chong."

Danny looked indignant at that remark for a second before he made a swooping motion with his hand, as if he let it slide in his mind. Then he grinned and followed Kwan inside. "I could've also called you Toyota. Or 'konnichiwa'. It's not like they know any Japanese."

"I'm Chinese, Phantom!" came from further down the station, prompting Danny to laugh.

XXX

The door looked old, that was for certain. It was as purple as the rest of them, but the giant dragon etched into it made it stand out from the rest.

"You sure there's not a dragon waiting for us on the other side of that door?" asked Kwan uncertainly when Danny lifted him up to open the door.

"Pretty sure. These pocket dimensions are rarely 'exactly what is says on the tin'. And if there is... well, I've fought dragons before. Am even pretty good friends with one, actually."

Kwan carefully opened the door and held it in his hands in case there was something evil on the other side, like there was at the last door. But all he saw was a wooden wall barely five inches from his nose.

"Well, that's a small lair," Danny remarked. Kwan felt the tingly feeling he now recognized as intangibility wash over him and Danny flew them inside, phasing them through the wall. "That's more like it."

The wooden wall connected to another wooden wall, which connected to a wooden house. There were people, real humans, milling about in the street beyond the wooden house. At first glance it looked like they had hit up Chinatown during rush hour. The only difference was that this town didn't look like Chinatown, it looked like it _was_ China. The wooden houses had the telltale gabled roof as if they had sprung from a child's drawing about the architecture of the Far East.

The street looked like a market street, with shops and stands strewn all over the place. It was narrow and hot, with merchants trying to out-shout each other and shoppers haggling about the price of the fish. People pushed past the invisible and intangible pair, their arms loaded with plastic bags and small children, chatting away on cell phones or to their spouses.

"Remember where we parked," said Danny and without warning took off, lifting Kwan with ease a hundred feet into the air. He tightened his grip on Danny's forearms and heard a grunt when he squeezed a little too hard. Danny's flesh was remarkably squishy, as if the bone structure underneath was hidden under a layer of fat. But Danny was as slim as ever. It had to be the ectoplasm.

Kwan tried to distract himself from the height they floated at by thinking about the properties of ectoplasm, but it didn't work. The village sprawled beneath them like a living plate of spaghetti, with roads haphazardly crossing across the country and spiraling around wooden houses with dark roofs, brickwork offices and glass skyscrapers. The village looked like its architect had only seen snapshots of other cultures and cherry picked the best parts, placing them randomly inside the village. The market street they had appeared in was invisible inside the myriad of streets stretching out below them.

In the distance the land slowly rolled upwards and turned into snow-capped mountains.

"I think we're in China," offered Kwan. "The houses, the landscape... and the people."

"I think you're right. The house the ghost portal was in looked a lot like one of those temples you always see on documentaries about China."

Danny slowly flew around, his legs not turning into his ghost tail just yet. They stayed silent while observing the territory.

"Looks modern," remarked Kwan. "Maybe 1990, around 2000?"

"Could be, though I saw people on cell phones. 2005?"

"It'll look silly if we ask someone which year it is, won't it?"

"We can pretend to be time travelers," replied Danny and Kwan could hear the grin in his voice. They dipped a little lower to avoid a helicopter and then lowered some more. And then more.

"Danny?" asked Kwan at the same time Danny said, "I don't feel so good."

Kwan could only hold on for dear life as the two of them spiraled down in a barely-controlled descent before Danny lost it completely and they slipped into free-fall.


	5. Chapter 5

The ground appeared way too rapidly for Kwan's liking as Danny lost control of his flight. With an enormous grunt Danny managed to pull up at the last second, but they still hit the ground pretty hard. Football practice came in handy as Kwan rolled on the ground, revolving three times before the gravel slowed him down enough to come to a stop. Danny had dropped them on a flat rooftop belonging to a brick office building. Kwan felt something wet on his face as he got up, but his first priority was Danny. The half-ghost lay sprawled on the ground, several pebbles stuck in his hair but otherwise he seemed okay. Apart from the fact that he took harsh, deep breaths.

 "Talk to me Danny," commanded Kwan as he knelt next to the half-ghost, laying a hand on his back. His other hand crept towards the first-aid kit inside his bag.

 "Burns," rasped Danny. "My face, body, burns. Weak, somebody draining me."

 Kwan tilted Danny's chin up and looked at his face. His eyes looked red and swollen, as if somebody maced him a few seconds ago. Tears leaked out and the red spread across his cheeks, making him look more alive than dead. But in a ghost that probably wasn't a good sign.

 Danny choked as he drew in more breaths and started coughing. And he didn't stop, only pausing for a second to draw in a deep breath before he continued. Kwan thought he recognized the symptoms. A college buddy suffered from the same symptoms, but he hoped that wasn't it. Because Danny could die from that and Kwan had no idea where the nearest hospital or first-aid place was.

 He desperately tried to recall Danny's health form, but he knew that little was on that. To be an astronaut you had to have superior health. But Danny's half-ghost existence hadn't been mentioned on that form, which meant that more might have been held back.

 "Any allergies?!" Kwan demanded, but Danny didn't answer. Instead he transformed back to a human and collapsed entirely. The coughing thankfully stopped but the redness in his face remained and appeared to grow worse.

 "Bl- blood blossoms," Danny managed to squeeze out. His eyes fluttered wildly as he tried to get rid of the no doubt burning feeling in his eyes, but only more tears appeared.

 "Did you eat any of those, got into contact with them, saw any?"

 Danny shook his head and rubbed his eyes, sitting up slowly. "Water?"

 "Here," Kwan reached into his bag and got out his canteen, popping it open before handing it to Danny. Danny gratefully took it and emptied half of it. He poured the rest over his face and sighed in relief.

 "That helped, thanks."

 "Wait, that helped? That's not a normal allergic reaction."

 Danny threw Kwan a look which said 'I _am_ abnormal, you dolt'.

 "It's something in the air, burning me, or at least, my ghost side. It still hurts now, but a lot less. With water I can wash whatever it is off."

 "But it'll keep on building up, even when you're human. We have to get back to the portal and get out of here."

 "Agreed."

 Danny tried to get up and Kwan jumped up, offering a helping hand. With a smile Danny took it, wobbling slightly as he stood on his own two legs. He frowned when he noticed Kwan's face.

 “You're hurt,” he said, rummaging around in his own bag for the first-aid kit. Kwan touched the spot where the warm wetness originated and his fingers came back red. Danny expertly took care of the wound, after ascertaining that Kwan hadn't gotten a concussion from the tumble.

 "To get back, first we have to get off this roof," said Danny. The pebbles crunched underneath their feet when they walked around. Kwan wondered when someone was going to come through the small hatch connecting the roof to the rest of the building, demanding to know what two American astronauts were doing on the roof. A huge A/C unit puffed cold air into the building but spewed out hot air into the surrounding, even hotter, air.

 "We can try going down through the building," suggested Kwan. Danny gestured towards himself.

 "We do draw a lot of attention, dressed like this." He got a pensive look on his face. "Hold on, let me try-"

 He disappeared from sight. Kwan blinked once, twice, but Danny stayed hidden. He looked around to see if Danny had somehow teleported, but no dice.

 "Ouch," said the thin-air, and then Danny appeared, once again fighting back allergy-tears. "Right, using my powers hurts, even when I'm human. Guess we have to escape through the building somehow. I can at least phase us through the hatch."

 Kwan walked towards the hatch to inspect it, trying to make as little noise as possible. But his heavy body made that hard. They were _so_ going to get arrested. And without Phantom to back them up, that could get ugly.

 "Wait," said Danny. "I got an idea."

 Kwan turned back to Danny, once again crunching the pebbles against each other.

 "We could try overshadowing," was all the explanation Kwan got. He furrowed his brow as he tried to recall what that entailed. There were still a lot of unknowns about ghost powers, and he'd come across 'overshadowing' once or twice, but it was a power the Fentons hadn't published much about.

 "I don't like doing it, but sometimes I have to. And I think now is one of those times, because I can still use my powers without being exposed to whatever is causing the allergic reaction. I hope."

 "You take over someone's mind when you do that, correct?" Kwan narrowed his eyes at Danny. Danny had his powers since he was fourteen. He remembered his own world view when he was that age, and if he had ghost powers, they probably would get abused. Had Danny done the same with his overshadowing? Was this the other fist, slowly being revealed?

 "Sort of. The person being overshadowed doesn't remember, unless I ... let them. But I'd like to explain that when my skin doesn't burn."

 "So if I let you take over, you can get us out of this dimension?"

 "Yes."

 Kwan crunched over to Danny, now far less aware of the noise he made. It was a way out, but he preferred to be in complete control of his body. Becoming an astronaut had taught him that some things were beyond his control, however. So he took a deep breath and said, "Fine. How do we-"

 "Just stand there and I'll take care of it."

 Without another word Danny transformed, pulling back his lips and gritting his teeth in pain as he did so. With closed eyes against the allergic reaction which once again bloomed across his face he turned see-through and dove towards Kwan.

 Kwan actually _felt_ Danny disappear inside of him, a chill which spread out from his chest into the rest of his body before settling down into a concentrated ball of deadness on the left side of his heart. He felt confused for a second when a strange whisper in his mind made itself known but then his consciousness was buried underneath Danny's powers, snuffing out his line of thought. It was cold-

* * *

His return to the waking world was abrupt and weird, with his own hand slapping his own cheeks without him giving the commands.

"Ah, there you are," he heard himself say. But his words sounded hollow, his tone devoid of his own way of speaking. Exactly what anyone would sound like with someone else's knowledge of how to work the larynx forcefully pressed upon a mind.

 "Bad news," continued his wrong voice, "the portal has closed while we were gone."

 The chill which emanated from the core of deadness felt more prominent now as his innards froze as well. Were they stuck?

 They were back in the wooden room they emerged out of, there was no doubt about it. The small window showed the same view of the marketplace down below. But there was no mass of green swirling ectoplasm to mark the entrance into the Ghost Zone. He felt that Danny allowed him to seize back control over his mouth to answer.

 "Can't you create a new one?"

 There, now his words sounded right again. Couldn't they discuss this telepathically or something? They _were_ sharing a body. But the chill crept back as Danny answered.

 "Not while I'm affected by this mysterious air. It drains me and I have to use a lot of power to create a portal, which draws more mystery-pain out. Sorry, which is why I'm still in your body. I know it's bad etiquette and all, but outside it really hurts."

 "And me talking to myself is a side effect of that?" asked Kwan. Seriously, in all the works of fiction anybody who was possessed could at least keep the chatter inside his or her own mind. But here they were, with him being properly possessed by Phantom, and every time Danny talked he felt like he had dipped his jaw into ice water.

 "Trust me, it's safer this way. Unless you _want_ me to delve deeper into your brain, take ultimate control of your speech centers and become a disembodied voice in your mind."

 "Best not," concluded Kwan. He shifted from foot to foot, relieved that Danny had handed over the reins to his body. The wooden room was not much to look at. Upon the light wood hung some nice drawings of trees, often with an encouraging quote written neatly underneath it. There were soft white mats covering the center of the room, looking like a rug puzzled together. The walls connecting the room to the rest of the building were done in light wood with intricate carvings. All in all, it looked like a traditional Chinese room. But it still lacked a portal to the Ghost Zone.

 "Best not," repeated Danny. "But while I'm in your body I can't create a portal. To be frank, it'd rip you apart if I tried. That's why I transform in the first place, because a human body isn't meant to deal with ghost powers."

 "But the second you fly out, you can't do anything because of whatever it is that's floating around and robbing you of your powers."

 "Exactamundo."

 Kwan walked over to the window and looked out over the marketplace. In the distance he saw the office building where they had crash landed on the roof.

 "You said that sometimes there are natural portals leading to the Ghost Zone. Any way to find those?"

 The control over his mouth was gone again when Danny answered. "Not without the Infini-map. Or a whole lot of luck. Or a man-made ghost portal. Or finding Wulf."

 "At least we've got options," said Kwan, optimistic as always. He rubbed his arms while he thought, staring at the striped roof of one of the stands down below.

 "How about you try flying as far as you can - see if we can't get out of this allergy zone of yours," said Kwan slowly, thinking it out. If it was something in the air which hurt Danny, maybe they could get out of range. Anything airborne had to be scattered by the wind at some point, and at that point they could create a new portal back into the Ghost Zone.

 "We could try that... or we could get what we came for in the first place, try to find a way to repel the mystery-allergy and create a portal right here. That'll get us a lot closer to the ISS, because if we fly too far, who knows where we'll end up once we get back in the Ghost Zone."

 "Which means that you'll keep on overshadowing me," said Kwan, trying to hide the distaste in his voice. He wasn't sure how much Danny could feel while inhabiting his body, but at least he could maintain his outward appearance. Oh God, how much _did_ Danny know? And what could he find out? He hadn't thought about that when he first agreed to this, because Danny had been in pain and they'd needed a solution. But now... how long did this have to go on?

 "Sort of... but we can do a _joined_ overshadowing," Danny hastened to add. Kwan could feel him shift around in his mind, the core of deadness becoming a bit less pronounced.

 "And what, pray tell, is that?" Kwan crossed his arms and moved away from the window. A jump suited astronaut staring out across the marketplace might come across as a bit odd if someone happened to look up. Most people didn't, although the people in Amity Park had learned the hard way that most dangers came from above.

 "It's kinda like what we're doing now, only you've got control of my powers too. The basic ones, that is. And we can mentally talk. It digs a little deeper than this, but I've done it before and you won't come to any harm."

 Kwan paced, that always helped him think. It was something he had sorely missed while in space, because pacing was pretty much useless in micro gravity, unless you liked to spin around in circles.

 "So we share your powers, you're still immune to the allergy, we can talk without sounding like a loon and it's relatively safe? What's the downside?"

 Kwan felt his chest heave as Danny blew out a sigh. It felt wrong, the command his brain had given his body was wrong, he didn't need to breathe like that right now, but he shared his body.

 "We-e-ll," Danny drawled, "the first couple of hours you'll feel really cold, because I've got ice powers. Oh, and you have to shield your thoughts from the other. And... I can sort of guarantee that you'll be freaked out by the powers. First-hand experience and all that."

 "How do you know all this?" asked Kwan. Danny took a beat too long to reply.

 "I started experimenting with overshadowing when I was eighteen - I _had to_ experiment with it. Long story why that was, but Tucker volunteered. He knew about my powers for four years by then. Hell, he even briefly had powers himself. But it still freaked him out to no end. And I found more about him while overshadowing than I liked to know. But if we keep our thoughts shielded it'll be no problem. Frankly, I think it's our only ticket out of here."

 Kwan threw up his hands in defeat. Every second they wasted standing around talking felt like a second a ghost could invade the ISS and use it for evil plots to take over Earth and whatnot.

 "Alright, let's do it then. Anything I should do?"

 "We should get to a secure location first. And find a blanket."

 "Agreed," said Kwan. Before he realized what that entailed, Danny's ice-like grip clamped down on his brain and he knew no more.

* * *

Kwan shivered when Danny left his body. The gassy shape solidified into Phantom and for a second Kwan felt the sweet relief of life flooding back into him. The cold powers were gone and his heart beat a bit faster to flood the area with warm, utterly human blood.

 "Where did you take us?" asked Kwan. As he looked around the room he could deduce the answer himself.

 A neatly made bed took up most of the space inside the room, its dull gray covers tucked underneath the corners of the mattress. It was a small room, furnished with, besides the bed, a table, a television and a night stand supporting a bedside lamp. Two doors led to other rooms. The window gave a view of a brick wall which Kwan could touch if he leaned out the window.

 "A hotel, huh," remarked Kwan. He opened one of the doors and gave the bathroom an once-over. Functional shower, toilet, sink, check. White-tiled bathroom, horrible stripe-patterned walls in the hotel room. Cheap yellow carpet tried to make the room a bit sunnier, but it was worn and spattered with questionable stains.

 "Yeah, seemed like the best choice. Shall we?"

 "How did you pay?" asked Kwan. He braced himself in the middle of the room, putting his hands on his hips.

 "I didn't. Phased us in. Ready?"

 The grimace of pain was already apparent on Danny's face when Kwan nodded. Without wasting another word Danny turned back into his unreal see-through form and once again dived towards Kwan. This time he felt more ready, but even so the shock of dead was more pronounced. Maybe because his body still rejoiced in the feeling of being utterly _alive_. He almost tried to force Danny out but he grit his teeth and rode out the cold feeling spreading across his body.

 Kwan didn't lose his consciousness, which made the process a bit worse. He could feel another mind burrow its way into his, not unlike having a voice whisper in your mind, a voice you don't recognize as your own. When Danny had settled, the cold feeling coiled inwards and focused into a core to the right of his heart. He started shivering and his teeth chattered as despite the hotness in the room his body reacted to the presence of a ghost inside him.

 'Alright,' Danny's voice said to Kwan, 'now relax and in a couple of hours you'll feel better. Wrap a blanket around yourself.'

 The voice was surreal, but undoubtedly belonged to Danny. Kwan listened to his advice and wrapped his shivering body in all the blankets in the room. He lay down on the bed and stared out the window, waiting for his body to acclimatize.

 He lost track of time as he only focused on taming the cold. He might have drifted off into sleep, he wasn't sure. But he did notice when his body no longer moved without his consent, when the wisps of illness didn't bother him anymore. He sat up, shedding the blankets and stretched his body with a few gratifying cracks.

 'Good, you're back,' Danny spoke inside his mind. 'I was getting bored. Want to show you how to access my powers?'

 Kwan hesitated in answering back. Did he just _think_ what he wanted to say or did he have to vocalize it as well?

 'If you want to talk to me, imagine that you're talking to my corporeal body. That way I can pick up your thoughts from the millions of thoughts running around in here. Seriously, you have an interesting subconscious.'

  _Alright_ , thought Kwan, _testing, testing. Purple monkey dishwasher._

 'Receiving you loud and clear, Kwan,' answered Danny promptly. And he dived right into explaining. 'You've got access to what ghost experts call the basic three powers. They're-'

  _Flight, intangibility and invisibility, I know. Are you sure I can use them as well? Aren't you supposed to control them somehow?_

'I am controlling them, simply by being inside you. As long as you don't try anything crazy, like tapping into my Ghostly Wail, I'm giving you small dosages of ghost powers, to do with as you please. It's a bit complicated and I'll be happy to discuss it with you once we're in a region where the very air outside doesn't burn me.'

 Properly chastised, Kwan couldn't stop himself from using body language to urge Danny's explanation on.

  _Show me_ , he thought, making a sweeping motion with his hand.

 'Emotions are important for ghosts. So it shouldn't be a surprise that you have to call upon certain emotions to get those effects. If you want to become invisible, try to feel like this.'

 Kwan felt ashamed to be in the hotel room, to have broken in so blatantly. He was in the wrong dimension, in the wrong part of space and time and he never wanted to be here.

 'Congratulations, you're invisible,' said Danny happily. Kwan had trouble not letting the feeling overwhelm him. But when he lifted up his arm to look at it, it was gone. His proprioception told him that it had to be there, but his eyes told him otherwise.

 'Intangibility is similar,' Danny continued relentlessly. The shameful feeling had barely filtered away when Danny replaced it by a dreamy feeling, something surreal. Kwan focused on an insignificant ding in the wall, staring at it like it held the answer to life itself. It actually felt a lot like he'd dosed up on cough syrup after a mind-numbing fever. He wasn't really there in mind and body.

 'Try passing through something,' urged Danny. Kwan tore his attention from the ding in the wall and passed his hand through the bedside table. His hand was a bit see-through as well, and slightly blue.

 'Great, that works as well. And finally, my personal favorite...'

 Kwan no longer felt like gravity applied to him. He was happy and content with the world. His spirit was lifted, literally, although he also felt a bit dizzy and disoriented. He saw that his feet left the ground and now dangled uselessly a foot from the ground.

 'Peter Pan wasn't that far off with the "think happy thoughts to fly" bit,' commented Danny casually. Kwan sensed that Danny let the feelings fade away and Kwan took a big breath.

 "Wow," he said out loud. He shook his head to get rid of the lingering threads of emotion.

  _And you feel like this every time you do one of those things?_ he asked. No wonder Danny had been an emotional wreck the first months after the accident. Having to feel like that every time he wanted to access his ghost powers would make anybody stress out.

 'Not really. I exaggerated them for you, so you can relate to them, I hope. Think you can try them yourself?'

  _I'll try_ , answered Kwan. He focused to let the feelings wash over him.

 It took Kwan several attempts and even then his control was sketchy, but at least he could call upon the powers whenever he needed them.

 'And if we ever get in trouble, I'll amplify them some more,' reassured Danny. 'Now, shall we head to the streets and see if we can buy an electrical transformer, two propellers and some bolts and screws? Oh, and two metal rods to prop the propellers on.'

  _Anything else you'd like to add to the shopping list?_ asked Kwan casually. He opened the door and peered outside, ready to pull his head back in if there someone stood in the hallway. But the long hallway was deserted. With swift movements he pulled the door shut behind him and set off, heading downstairs. He smiled at the receptionist, who smiled back but paid him no further attention. Kwan was relieved when the sun once again beat down on him. It helped warm the icy core inside him.

 'Market's that way,' said Danny. He pushed an impression onto Kwan, a suggestion of going left. It wasn't entirely a command, Kwan knew he could disobey it, but it was like a flirting woman. Possible to ignore, but why should he?

  _Shouldn't we look for an electrics store?_ asked Kwan. _And how do we intend to pay for this? You won't let me steal and we don't have any money_.

 'We'll figure something out,' replied Danny. 'Maybe they'll let us work for it.'

  _Let's hope so._

It took Kwan twenty minutes of walking before he was once again back at the market. There were still throngs of people milling about and Kwan had to sidestep a couple of determined people a few times as they hurried to some destination.

  _You know, it's weird_ , Kwan noticed. He almost said it out loud but caught it in time, broadcasting it to Danny instead. _I'm pretty sure this is China._

 'Yeah, I agree,' said Danny, raising his pitch at the end of his sentence. Kwan took the half-formed question to elaborate.

  _Everybody here looks Chinese, the architecture looks Chinese, the food looks Chinese..._

 'What are you trying to say, Kwan?' asked Danny.

  _So why is everybody speaking English?_

Kwan felt Danny's attention shift from the conversation to the world outside. He figured that Danny saw through his eyes, so he made sure to look at the clear English writings all around him, on the people bartering in English.

 'Good question,' replied Danny after a while. 'Maybe we're in an alternate dimension and England conquered China. Or English developed here instead of in England. I don't know.'

  _So there's not some kind of translation matrix built into your ghost powers?_ asked Kwan in a semi-joke. Ghost powers could be so freaky sometimes, you never knew. But then again, Danny had failed Spanish in high school.

 'I wish there was, but no such luck,' said Danny.

 As Kwan made his way through the people milling around, he noticed that the market stands all were in front of shops bearing the same name as the stand. Apparently this was how they conducted sales in this country, using the stand as a way to reach a bigger audience and hopefully get people to buy more. And it seemed to work, because everywhere he looked, people were haggling about the price of square watermelons, designer bags and there was even a stand with only cinnamon things. Buns, tea, the spice itself, books on how to cook with cinnamon, bagels, cinnamon leaf oil. There were less people buying from that stand.

 After strolling across the market for thirty minutes and still not finding anything he could use, Kwan tapped an older lady on her shoulder.

 “Excuse me,” he said, “do you happen to know where I can buy propellers? I know this might be a strange question, but it's urgent.”

 She turned around to see who he was and she gave him a thorough once-over. “I'd suggest you check the military surplus stand, near the back of the market.” She pointed down the road before giving him another once-over. “And I have to say, you speak the language very well for a foreigner!”

 Kwan couldn't quite think what to reply to that, so he just smiled at the woman and thanked her.

  _How did she know we're not from around here?_ Danny asked, but all Kwan could offer was a mental shrug.

'Old lady powers. Let's go check out that stand.'

 It took another fifteen minutes to fight his way through the crowd, but finally Kwan spotted a sign which had a combination of 'military' and 'surplus', even if there were some 'mega' and 'ultra' words added to the name.

 "Hello, hello, what can I get you this fine day?" asked the man tending the stand when Kwan approached.

 Put on the spot, Kwan improvised a story. Danny's idea to work for it wasn't such a bad idea after all.

 "I'm looking for two large propellers and some electrical tape. Oh, and some screws. Do you have any of that?"

 The man's face lit up and he rummaged through a crate hidden behind the stall. He laid a bundle of wires and some thick screws on top of his other wares. He then turned to the store behind the stall.

 "One moment, I've got propellers in there. You're lucky, the military base recently decommissioned some planes and I managed to get my hands on the parts they didn't need."

 Kwan couldn't believe it. He got everything he needed, in one stall in one try! They'd be back at the ISS in no time! If they managed to open a portal to the Ghost Zone, that was.

 'Are you absolutely sure we can't just nab it?' Kwan tried one more time, but Danny refused to even answer.

 "Have I got a treat for you, young man! Three industrial strength propellers, large enough to power a small plane! And I can give them to you for quite a reasonable fee!"

 The old man held three large propellers in his hands, measuring at least four feet in diameter. They were perfect! If only he had money...

 "They're perfect. _But_ ," began Kwan, hoping that the man would hear him out, "at the moment I've got no money. But I'm young and strong and willing to work. Name something I can help you out with to earn those propellers, and I'll do it."

 The old man soured and immediately put the propellers behind the stand. "No money, no stuff. And if I catch you stealing any I'll cut your hands off. Life is hard enough on my old back without you thieves stealing everything I own."

 A meat cleaver appeared from somewhere in the hidden depths of the stall and Kwan put his hands behind his back.

 "I'm not here to steal, sir. I'd like to work to earn them, that's all. No way I'm going to steal those, don't worry about that."

 "Get out of here, punk," the man replied, brandishing the cleaver. Kwan backed up and fled the scene, looking out for other stalls.

 'I doubt that we can find it all in one place,' Danny said inside his mind. 'A shame that guy was such a jerk.'

  _We'll find something_ , Kwan assured Danny, and maybe himself a little as well.

* * *

The day neared its end and so far they hadn't found another shop which sold propellers. Their lack of progress was getting annoying.

  _I still say we nick the things_ , Kwan reasoned, but Danny's voice inside his head returned the comment with a firm 'No!'

  _How else are we going to pick them up?_

 'We can go back to the Ghost Zone and find another dimension. There are bound to be more,' Danny said. 'I mean, the propeller is an old invention, at some point we have to find a dimension which also carries them.'

  _You're forgetting that humanity hasn't been around for that long, Danny. I'll bet that most of those doors lead to places where we'll only find dinosaurs or volcanoes or something. Our best bet is right here, right now_.

 Kwan paced around the small alley. It smelt like burnt fish and wet paper, but at least it was private enough to have a conversation with the voice inside his head. Sorry, the ghost currently overshadowing him.

 'Fine. You figure something out then,' Danny replied in a huff. The guy could be so aggravating sometimes. He was a hero, Kwan had to admit, but with the heroism came the unwanted tendencies to always act on the side of good, even if there were propellers to be found.

  _I will_ , Kwan said. He looked around, but the alley gave him no answers. _Now, what does a market vendor need?_ he wondered. The ghostly voice stayed silent. Kwan drew a mental brainstorm and observed the problem from different angles, as taught in the astronaut training. With some creative thinking he arrived at the answer.

 "He needs something to make his job easier."

 'Yeah, but what?' Danny broke his self-imposed silence.

 "I don't know," Kwan announced to the alley cat. It looked at the astronaut and meowed. It looked ratty and unkempt and Kwan didn't feel the least inclination to pet it. An unusual thing for him, because he loved animals of all shapes and sizes. Unless they were in an alley in alternate history China.

 'Thrilling,' Danny announced. The restless energies from the ghost kept Kwan pacing, and that's when the answer hit him.

 "We're going to jury-rig him a loader."

 'A loader?'

  _Didn't you notice him complaining about his back? I'll bet that loading and unloading that stand hurts him. If we can fix something to load those heavy boxes unto the stand, he'll give us the propellers_.

 'You hope,' Danny added and Kwan mentally agreed.

  _I know so. Now, we need materials_.

 The alley they stood in was as good a place to start as any. Deeper into the alley there were several dumpsters. Kwan rummaged through them with his nose wrinkled against the smell. From astronaut to hobo in one day. What a life. Well, at least he never got bored.

 In his head he had a mental picture how to create such a device. With some (alright, a lot) of tweaking from Danny's engineering mind they came up with an invention. It was going to be crude, but it would get the job done. After some heavy-duty dumpster diving around various alleys they found what they were looking for. Kwan hoped they could get back to the hotel room before they opened the portal, because he matched the smell inside the alleys.

 'Let me take over,' Danny instructed. For Kwan it was a weird feeling to hand his consciousness over to Danny. He felt his muscles relax and then tense when the ghost took over, and then Danny was in complete control. He used the various materials they'd found to jury-rig the invention they had thought up together, and for this first time in Kwan's life he knew what producing a ghost ray felt like. It was an angry feeling, like he had experienced when he had found his college girlfriend in the back of another guy's car. He had wanted to pound the thing into dust, and the guy along with it. In the end he merely broke up with her, but at that moment he could taste the rage in the back of his throat, threatening to bubble up and come out in the form of fists.

 It took Danny a bit longer than expected with the invention, even if he could weld the metal together without any problems. Danny kept making Kwan look around to make sure nobody saw them, hammering away in the alley. As the minutes stretched into an hour he thought back to the cinnamon stand. The air in this city tasted of cinnamon and he could go for a bun right now. Or a bagel, even some tea.

 'Finished,' Danny finally announced.

  _I know_ , Kwan replied dryly. He had been a witness, after all. He sagged for a moment when Danny handed control back over, but quickly he grabbed the invention and held it to his side. _We have to hurry back, I think the sun is already setting_.

'So fly there,' Danny said. Kwan closed his eyes as he recalled the floaty feeling. It was harder than he liked to admit, and finally he felt Danny give him a push in the right direction, along with an instruction to turn invisible. It was difficult to hold on to both feelings at once without losing control, but after a minute he felt ready to try. The ground disappeared underneath his feet and soon he looked out across the sea of roofs of the shops. He followed the brightly colored canvasses of the stands until he saw the drab olive one of the military surplus stand. He landed himself around the corner of the shop and after making sure nobody saw him he released the emotions with a sigh. He didn't like to admit it, but he felt drained after the short flight. Nevertheless he stepped towards the old man eying him with disdain.

* * *

After some heavy negotiating, two demonstrations and an IOU Kwan carried two propellers under his strong arms, along with two metal rods, nuts and bolts weighing his jumpsuit down. Danny's happiness with the transaction was a warm fuzzy feeling in his gut.

 'I still can't believe you could come up with something like that,' Danny said. 'And it worked like a charm. Unimaginable what kind of loader you can create with just a spring, a pedal and a tilting metal plate. He pushed the stuff into our hands so fast half of it fell to the ground.'

  _I know, it was glorious,_ Kwan said. He kept on walking with the items clamped under his arms. His muscles started to become sore, still not used to the strain he now had to put on them thanks to gravity. He walked out of the market street, dodging a protest rally. Something about the pollution by the local cinnamon factory. The protesters claimed that the factory had tainted the very air they breathed, spreading the cinnamon oil across the local river. The sun began to set, with the roofs of the buildings catching the orange rays and reflecting them towards the street. It made the whole street orange, which looked weird. Alternate Earth was weird.

 'Should I take over for the flight to get out of range of whatever hurts me?' Danny asked. Kwan hesitated for a second, but his drained muscles overpowered his pride.

 “Alright,” Kwan conceded.

 'Nobody's around,' Danny said, and without warning took control of Kwan's mind and body and lifted them off the ground.

  _Holy-_ Kwan thought as the solid ground disappeared. No wonder Danny had no problem adjusting to zero gravity, he lived it every day when he went flying. Danny steered them towards the edge of the city.

 'Keep a hold on those propellers,' Danny warned, and Kwan wrapped his arms around them. The setting sun made the whole city look orange, even the mountains in the distance had a coppery hue. It all looked rather magnificent.

 'Let's get out of here,' Danny said, and made them speed up. Kwan narrowed his eyes against the whipping wind and could barely see where Danny took them. Which meant that Danny couldn’t see very well either, but the half-ghost seemed to know where they were going. Or maybe he just made it look that way. The ground was now at least two hundred feet below, and Kwan didn't like the idea of another crash-landing like before. But the ghost seemed to have no trouble with the mysterious anti-ghost stuff in the air now that he was encased in Kwan's body.

 The mountain range came closer with incredible speed. Which was a good thing, because his eyes began to hurt. It was cold up here as well, although the happy flying feeling made him notice that far less. But when Danny landed them on the side of the mountain, below the edge of the snowline, the cold crept back in.

 'Alright, I think we're out of range. I'm going to leave you now. Man that sounds wrong.'

  _Agreed_ , Kwan said. He put down the propellers and various materials they'd gathered in preparation.

 Kwan knew he'd been overshadowed before, but he'd never consciously felt a (half) ghost leave his body after such an intimate overshadowing. The cold core to the right of his heart disappeared when Danny got out. Kwan breathed a wisp of blue air and there Danny was, hovering in front of Kwan. He carried a look on his face which could be 'I'm pooping' or 'I'm focusing'. Kwan hoped it was the second.

 "Nope, no pain," Danny announced, morphing the focused look to a big smile. He cracked his neck once, stretched his arms above his head and blew out a deep breath. "Sure feels good to be pain-free again. And in my own body."

 "I don't disagree with you," Kwan said. He too stretched, but then wrapped his arms around himself as the cold air made him shiver. "I mean, no offense, but that was _weird_."

 "Told you," Danny said. He indicated the pile of materials. "But at least we got something we can actually use out of it. So, let's head back to the Ghost Zone."

"And hope no ghost has discovered the station yet," Kwan muttered. He took a few steps back to give Danny room. The half-ghost set to work, the concentrated look back on his face. Green power glowed around his hands and he began to mimic a mime. He put his hands flat on the air, searching for something. He floated to the right, he floated to the left, and finally he found it. The green glow intensified until his hands were balls of light. He rubbed the air as if he was cleaning glass. Faster and faster his hands went. The fingers of his left hand found purchase and he grabbed the thin air. His right hand continued rubbing. Danny slowly pulled with his left hand, descending in an arc. The otherworldly green of the Ghost Zone shone through this gap between dimensions. A swirl of ectoplasm formed under Danny's right hand. He quickly used his left hand to somehow grab the edge of that swirl and followed the same arc as before. This time the swirl grew bigger, big enough to let a man through if he tucked and rolled. But still Danny kept on rubbing, teasing the edge of reality into giving in.

"Get ready to move," Danny announced. Kwan gathered the materials up in his arms and by then Danny had enlarged the hole even more. He stopped rubbing when the hole was big enough for the two of them to comfortably move through. The half-ghost floated back from the hole, turned around and lifted Kwan into the air by his armpits.

"Let's go!" Danny cried and dove through the hole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully I’ve made it clear through storytelling, but if you’re still scratching your head why Danny was hurt: cinnamon is one of the herbs used to ward off ghosts.


	6. Regroup

Lack of horizon and stillness were the first things Kwan noticed when they were back in the Ghost Zone. The green glow bathed them both in supernatural light, and Danny had to pull Kwan sideways to not get decapitated by a door. 

"See the station?" Danny asked, peering left and right. Kwan kept a look out for the station, but the whole Ghost Zone looked the same to him: like a maze within a labyrinth wrapped in a beehive. In the distance he saw something big swirling round and round. It looked a bit like humanity imagined a black hole to be like, sucking in matter, although technically that wasn't how black holes worked. 

But at any rate, he couldn't see the station from this vantage point. 

"I think it was more to the left," Kwan said, jerking his chin towards the direction he wanted Danny to fly in. Danny complied and together they soared through the dead air of the Ghost Zone. The familiar white and grey outer hull of the station didn't appear, however. 

"We did fly for quite some distance," Danny said, "so we have to cover that distance again. I remember I looked at that vortex from a different angle, so let's try that." 

Kwan hugged the materials a little tighter to his chest and Danny continued carrying him, sweeping left and right sometimes. They passed three ghosts, but the dead preferred to float in peace and they didn’t even look up at the passing astronauts. There were no other ways to navigate, there was only the utter stillness of the place. The doors bobbed up and down though, so at least they hadn't accidentally landed in the wrong Ghost Zone. If that was even possible. 

Danny's navigational skills proved themselves when they both spotted the floating island at the same time.

"Found it!" Danny called while Kwan tried to point at the station while saying, "Over there!" 

Kwan was glad he could let go of the heavy propellers by the time Danny deposited him down on the seemingly solid ground of the island. 

"I'm gonna go check for ghosts inside," Danny announced. Kwan noticed that he stayed in his Phantom outfit, or maybe he should say his Phantom body. 

"Need any backup?" Kwan asked. Danny waved it off and disappeared through the airlock. Kwan busied himself with sorting the materials. They had the basics for a propulsion system, but they still needed one important component: an electrical transformer. They could assemble the propellers and create a steering and propulsion part, and they had the power source to get it moving, but now they needed to temper the output of the ecto-converter. Otherwise it would blow up the, for lack of a better word, engine. 

"Shoo, shoo, get out," Danny uttered from inside the station. A few seconds later a curious assembly of moving blobs bobbed out of the airlock. They didn't make a sound but disappeared over the edge of the island and were soon lost against the backdrop of green inherent to the Ghost Zone.

"No ghosts I presume?" Kwan asked when Danny floated after the tiny things. He made a few more shooing gestures when some blobs hovered near the edge of the island, and they too dispersed. 

"No, just some globs." At a look from Kwan he elaborated. "Ghostly blobs. A bit like insects. Tiny, dumb things you can find everywhere inside the Ghost Zone. And sometimes outside it. Pretty much harmless." 

Kwan made a non-committal noise and pointed at the propellers. "Alright, I think I've figured out what we need next." 

Danny was quick to agree with his assessment and pointed at some doors. "Ready to go world-hunting again?"

"Hold up, some food and water first." 

"Sounds like a plan," Danny said and transformed back to human, heading to the airlock. 

XXX

When in space, humans sometimes realized that planet Earth and in particular the smart primates that lived there were not the most important thing in the universe. If the timeline of the planet was expressed on a twenty-four hour scale, humanity would occupy the last two seconds. 

There was something about sitting in a space station and watching that tiny and huge planet that made a man realize that his problems were insignificant, dust in the wind, to use a popular phrase. Kwan preferred to think of it as a blade of grass on a football field where giants (not necessarily The Giants) played a game. The blade of grass had no idea what the rules were, it could only hope that when treaded upon, it could recover. 

But this made it much harder for Danny and Kwan to find a proper door. A transformer capable of handling ecto-energies they could use had to come from a small window in time. They had calculated that they could find one somewhere between the introduction of alternating current in the 1850s and whenever nano cables would replace the wiring in homes. Kwan put that somewhere between 2030 and 2040, while Danny pinpointed that at 2025. 

Which gave them a window of 175 years. A microscopic window in the large scheme of things. 

"Hey, we managed to find the propellers," Kwan said in an attempt to cheer Danny up. 

"Yeah, I know," Danny said, but heaved a deep sign nonetheless. "But this is the twelfth door, and all of them were duds." 

Kwan knew Danny was right, but then again, there were hundreds upon thousands of doors they could check. The eleven they had checked out so far had only led them to the wrong places. They had encountered a door  _inside_ an active volcano, a door that led to outer space, a door showing another part of the Ghost Zone, and a door which opened up to a barren wasteland. There hadn't been a plant or animal in sight, only dry, cracked earth. 

"We just have to keep on looking," Kwan said. "Come on, that door over there looks nice."

Danny flew them to the door and carefully opened it. The face full of lava Danny had been able to phase through just in time had made the both of them cautious. The door opened... and showed a ghost's lair, if the green glow and small dimensions of the room were any indication. The ghost wasn't home, so Danny quickly shut it and moved on to the next one. 

"This would go so much faster if you could fly as well," Danny remarked. Kwan shrugged. 

"Yeah, not much I can do about that. And you are  _not_ overshadowing me again." 

"I only do that if I have to," Danny defended himself. But Kwan hadn't forgotten the dead core inside his chest, the shivering, the whispering in his mind. 

"And who decides when you 'have to'?" Kwan challenged. Danny peered into a doorway and didn't answer. 

"No human civilization," he summed up and shut it. "So much for lucky number thirteen." 

"Let's keep on looking," Kwan suggested. 

And they did just that. For five whole hours they searched, flying left and right, expanding their search circle, becoming ever more desperate. But not a single door was any good. There were either no humans, no technology they could use, or the doors led to ghost lairs or space. 

Kwan and Danny had checked out some doors where they did find humans, but most of the time it was in an era where there was no electricity around. The Ghost Zone seemed to prefer the past to the 21st century. Then again, there were a lot more years 'in the past' than in the hundred years of the 21st century. 

They found one door which led to a seemingly modern age. There was even a city nearby. But when they flew over it, they saw people rioting in the street, human beings throwing burning things at one another and in the general direction of the police, and to top it all off they spoke a language Danny and Kwan couldn't even remotely place. 

They marked the door in case they got  _really_ desperate, but they weren't that willing to risk burning alive or getting shot by the police to get their transformer. Not when there were other options. 

It was a shame they had to stick close to the location of the ISS, otherwise they could've flown halfway across the world, to a city where there was no rioting. But then they'd never find their way back to the station. Getting back from English China to the station had been hard enough already, and that had been at most five miles. 

Danny flew them to yet another door, but sagged a little halfway in his trajectory. He recovered quickly enough, but Kwan was immediately alarmed. His head gave an alarming throb when he remembered the last time Danny lost control of his trajectory and they ended up eating gravel. 

"You alright?" Kwan asked, trying to decipher Danny's thoughts from his glowing green eyes. 

"Fine," Danny said. For some reason, Kwan doubted that. He said so out loud, and Danny threw him an annoyed look.

"I'll live," Danny then said. A bit more honest than 'fine', but still not close enough to the truth to Kwan's liking. So he switched tactics.

"Well, I won't. I think we're due for another break. It's been five hours, I'm exhausted." 

" _You're_ exhausted? I've been flying us around for-" Kwan threw Danny a brilliant grin when the half-ghost cut himself off, catching on to Kwan's tactics. Or manipulation, to be frank. 

"Kwan, sometimes you're as annoying as you were back in high school," Danny said softly. That one kinda stung, but Kwan let it slide. Danny had been the annoying one, after all. Always disrupting class, disappearing inside the bathroom, snoring through Mr. Lancer's lectures... in hindsight, living Phantom's life probably wasn't easy, especially in the confined quarters and hours of high school. How had the guy ever made it through college? 

Danny turned around and flew them back towards the station. In those five hours they had come across some more ghosts, but most of them were content to leave the two astronauts (ghostzonenauts?) alone. The two ghosts that had taken an interest in the pair fled when Danny showed them a ball of green light in his hand. Apparently Phantom's reputation preceded him, or they could somehow sense his power. 

When they touched down Kwan rolled his shoulders and whirled his arm a few times, trying to get the blood flowing again. Pins and needles would soon follow, but that was still better than the numbness. And there the pins were, with the needles soon following after. Kwan rubbed his arm a few more times and then tried to ignore it by focusing on other things. 

Danny walked into the station and Kwan followed him. The amount of rest he'd had prior to this whole adventure was minimal, and the ten-hour nap felt like three days ago already. 

"We should take another nap," Kwan said, pointing at the rolled-up sleeping bags. 

"Agreed," Danny said with a nod. "I'll take the first watch." 

"Nah, I'll do that," Kwan retorted. "You've been flying us around all day, you said so yourself, you're exhausted." 

"Well, not  _exhausted_ , just tired. Like I said, I'll live." But the way Danny kept himself grounded was enough of a sign for Kwan to press on. 

"Stop being so damn heroic and go to sleep, ghost boy." 

"Make me, jock," Danny challenged. He used every ounce of his supernatural presence to scare Kwan, but as a citizen of Amity Park Kwan had long ago outgrown fear of ghosts. It was pure self-preservation which kept him out of the way of ghosts, especially their rampages through town. 

"Come on, Danny, you're our only line of defense. I need you well-rested and fit to fight." 

"And I need you to keep a sharp eye out for threats, but you can only do that if you've slept," Danny argued right back. 

Kwan wanted to shake the man until he could see sense, but if Danny was stubborn enough to cling to life after every attempt on his, Kwan could shake until his arms gave out but it would make no difference.

"Rock, paper, scissors," Kwan finally said. "Loser has to sleep." 

"Kwan, just go to sleep-"

"One, two..." Kwan cut Danny off and made the motions with his hand. With a theatrical sigh Danny formed a fist. On three they both presented their choice. 

"Scissors beat paper," Danny announced in a mocking tone, fake-cutting Kwan's outstretched hand. "Go to bed, Kwan." 

Without much complaint, he had lost fair and square, after all, Kwan settled himself into the sleeping bag. Sleep followed not long after that. 

XXX

Awakening to green light instead of the familiar blinking screens of the station was strange. Awakening to Phantom flipping through a book sitting cross-legged in mid-air was even stranger. 

Kwan worked himself to his elbows and cracked his neck. "How long was I out?" he asked. Phantom jerked as if surprised and closed the book. 

" 'bout three hours."

"Long enough," Kwan decided. He regretted having to vacate the warm sleeping bag, but he got up nonetheless. "Your turn."

"... Fine," Danny finally said. He unfolded his legs and joined the ground-dwellers again. The white hair bobbed up and down as Danny got in the sleeping bag, putting the book beside his head. It was the manual for the ecto-converter. Kwan knew that manual inside and out and could probably repair the ecto-converter while blindfolded. But it was good to flip through it one more time, since they would be relying on it in a short amount of time. Hopefully they could find a good door pretty soon, because the green was getting old. As was the constant threat of unfriendly ghosts. 

Danny turned over several times while Kwan read the manual. It felt safer to stay in the same room. Since ghosts could phase through the station, even harmless globs, bigger and badder things would have no trouble with the non-existent security. 

After twenty minutes of turning Danny opened his glowing eyes and locked his hands behind his head. 

"How the hell do you do it?" he asked. Kwan marked the page of the manual he was currently reading and closed it.

"Falling asleep? Try being exhausted," Kwan helpfully supplied. Danny snorted.

"I  _am_ , but my mind isn't. I just hate that we haven't found a good door to get a transformer yet. I'd even take Cybertron right now."

Kwan tried to compute that reference, but it was probably something geeky. He gave a chuckle for good measure.

"Just, try to get some sleep. Like I said, you and your powers are currently our only line of defense."

"We should try to get to Clockwork," Danny suddenly said, sitting upright. Kwan heaved a sigh. That guy couldn't stay down. Many of his enemies had found out about that the hard way. 

Kwan asked the obvious question, and Danny elaborated. "Clockwork is a ghost who can control time. He's sort of responsible for me, long story, but his castle is a safe spot. If we manage to get there, we can repair the nickel-hydrogen batteries, I can rip open a portal and get the station back in place."

Kwan kept quiet for a few seconds as he processed that. "Sounds like a plan, but, a ghost who can control  _time_ ?"

Danny pointed at Kwan in an accusing manner. "Hey, there are thousands of ghosts with powers. Is time control really that weird?"

"Yes. Sure, you can create portals, but controlling time itself... That's kind of out there."

The green eyes glowed even brighter, silently creeping Kwan out. Eyes were  _not_ supposed to do that.

"The Ghost Zone is the flipside of Earth, contains all ghosts, all of those ghosts have powers. There are ghosts that can  _grant wishes_ , control technology, brainwash people... There are a lot of things out there, you know."

"Fine, fine," Kwan placated. The glow died out when Kwan picked up the manual. "I suppose I haven't encountered enough ghosts yet. Thank God. By the way, Danny - get some sleep!"

Danny let himself fall backwards and winced as his head clanged against the metal, padded only by a thin sleeping bag. "Yes, mother," he muttered, turning his back to Kwan. Kwan let the comment slide and focused on the manual, but his mind kept drifting to the things Danny had said. 

So when the half-ghost kept on turning, never falling asleep, before finally sitting upright again, Kwan had an inquiry ready. 

“So the Ghost Zone is the flipside of Earth,” Kwan immediately dove in.

“Yeah,” Danny replied, a bit puzzled.

“And it contains all ghosts.”

“Yeah.” Even more puzzled.

“So how big is it?”

Danny pulled a thinking face, a bit taken aback at the question. “I- I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet. I try to spend as little time in here as possible, because pretty much all my enemies live here. Talk about the lair of the dragon.”

“But it’s not spherical or anything? So if this is the flipside of Earth… Does it contain all the souls?” Kwan really wanted to know. Because if every single soul wound up here...

“I guess so.”

“So this is pretty much the afterlife,” he concluded. He had thought about it before, but now that he was inside the real thing, it didn't feel like an afterlife. More like a weird dimension, more of a nexus, leading to other worlds out there. 

“I’m afraid so. I think." Danny rubbed his neck as he thought. "I haven’t come across any famous ghosts or anything. I guess only the ones who had a good reason to linger stay in the ghost zone. The rest just … scatter.” He looked apologetic, as if he could somehow change the natural order but was unwilling to do so. 

“So everything I see was once a living thing.”

Danny nodded. 

“But back to the size of it - why only souls of the people on planet Earth? I can’t imagine why no other planets have developed life. So does it stop at planet Earth, is it spherical? And if so, where’s the rest of the universe? We’ve pretty much proven that there was microbiotic life on Mars - where’s that gone?”

“I have actually thought about that," Danny said with a note of pride. Kwan recalled that Danny had been working on a paper recently, and apparently it was about this subject. "From what I know the Ghost zone goes on forever. But it might go on until the end of the universe. It may not just be the flipside of Earth, but of the entire universe. But because the distance between the planets is so huge, we haven’t come across alien life yet.”

“Makes sense. Without light speed it’d take an alien life form… pretty much eternity to reach us.” Kwan drew a diagonal line with his finger, implying eternity with the gesture. He ended up pointing at a dead laptop screen. 

“And there’s very little guidance along the way," Danny added. Kwan could almost see the little green men dancing around inside his brain. Alien ghosts. Could happen. "I know my way around an area roughly the size of... West Virginia. But that’s because there are so few landmarks. It's just doors, doors and more doors. And green. As you know." 

“So I guess my next question is - who lives here?”

“Well, ghosts,” Danny said in a 'duh' voice. 

“Just ghosts? When does a human decide to become a ghost?” 

"My parents theorized that a ghost is pretty much an after-image of a human’s emotions. That's why they’re so … exaggerated. Ectoplasm feeds on emotions, to put it simple. And if there’s enough emotion, they absorb it,  _become_ it. And then they become self-conscious, remold the ectoplasm into an image and a new ghost is born.”

“So ectoplasm itself is alive,” Kwan concluded with a grin on his face. He’d been steering Danny towards this conclusion. 

Danny frowned. “No, it’s dead. Ghosts are dead.”

“But the ectoplasm is alive. It has all the necessary criteria for life. I've even written a paper on it. It still has to be accepted by any journals, but that's the science world for you."

Danny mouthed to himself as he tried to remember the biology lessons of high school, but Kwan saw that they failed to rise to the surface. “Ectoplasm has a metabolism," he explained. "An anabolism, which means it feeds off energy. Well, emotions, but you can call that a type of energy. It has to reproduce-“

“It reproduces. Look at Lunch Box,” interrupted Danny with a shudder. Kwan had no idea why Danny mentioned lunch at this point, but the man elaborated: “The daughter of the Box Ghost and the Lunch Lady.”

“The Box Ghost… now there’s a name I haven’t heard in years.” The image of a plump blue ghost popped up. Something to be 'beware' about. 

“He’s still around, I’m afraid. But anyway - so ectoplasm can reproduce and has a metabolism. What else?” 

“It has homeostasis, it can contain itself. Ghosts, for example. It responds to stimuli, can grow and most important of all, can adapt to its environment through succeeding generations.” Kwan sounded like he just summed up his entire paper, but the terms sprung up surprisingly easily. Which didn't surprise him, given how much time he'd worked on it, although it still hadn't gotten published. No wonder Maddie and Jack Fenton became a bit frustrated, it wasn't easy to get the ectosciences regarded as a serious field. And Kwan graduated in a year _after_ the Disasteroid. 

Danny went silent for a minute as he contemplated this. “But ectoplasm can’t really  _grow_ . It can cluster together to form a new ghost, but once made it can’t-“ He cut himself off. “Technus. Technus changed his form. So I guess it can grow. Or reform, anyway.”

Kwan pointed at Danny. “Look at yourself. You’re proof that ectoplasm can grow. It grew along with your own body during puberty. If I recall, you grew stronger every year.” 

Danny had nothing to say to that, so he latched on to the next point. “But it can’t die. If something lives, it should also be able to die. But ectoplasm just … keeps on going, even if it hasn’t been fed in thousands of years.” 

Kwan shrugged. “Maybe it has a really slow metabolism.”

“Why do ghosts crave energy, then?” 

“I had no idea ghosts could go hungry,” Kwan replied in all seriousness. Ectoplasm gave no sign that it ever needed energy. 

A faint blush appeared on Danny’s cheeks. Kwan realized that Danny had blurted out that part, and apparently he was ashamed that his ghost half had the same cravings as many of the ghosts he fought. He briefly wondered how that worked for Danny, since he also had to eat. Could he sustain his body through the energy from emotions alone? Or did his ghostly half draw energy from his human half?

“It’s not really a hungry feeling, it’s more like… you know when you’re full but suddenly you want, like, chips or something, _bad_. Your body is telling you - hey, you need salt. It’s like that. Not as debilitating as hunger, but more like your body saying to you that prying emotions from people is a good idea.” 

“And that explains why so many ghosts want to scare people.”

“Yeah, they probably feel that craving a lot stronger than I do.” 

It was the first time that Kwan had heard Danny confess that he was no longer completely human. Apparently he identified with ghosts as well, judging by his wording. 

“Don’t worry though,” Danny added hurriedly, “I won’t start scaring you and such. Only when I’m in ghost mode for more than eight hours do I get the craving.” 

“Can I ask you something personal?” Danny shrugged as an answer. Here they were, drifting in the middle of the Ghost Zone, philosophizing about whether or not ectoplasm was alive. Kwan knew that one more personal question wasn’t going to be the end of Danny.

“Do you get that craving when you’re a human as well?” Kwan asked. 

The look on Danny's face fell a little. It had to be an unpleasant subject. Kwan had seen that Danny could perform minor ghost-related abilities when he was human, which meant that even in human form the ghostly energies bled over. Which made him something else entirely, not just a guy who could switch between the two states. It had blended into something new.

Slowly, Danny nodded. “Sometimes, when I’m really hungry, I get the urge to … provoke someone, get a reaction out of it. Like when you’re in a bad mood, you want to snap at somebody, even if they’re the nicest person in the world.”

They both kept silent for ten seconds and stared at the expanse of green and black, with purple doors slowly floating past. 

Danny took a deep breath and looked at Kwan. “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. You’re incredibly calm for an astronaut who’s currently stranded in a strange dimension.” 

“What can I say, I’m trained to deal with stressful situations. I _am_ an astronaut, after all.” Kwan gave a winning grin.

"As am I, but to be totally honest, I'm freaking out a little bit. How am I ever going to get the station back in one piece in space? I still have to drag it through the Ghost Zone, repair it, and then somehow get it back in space. That is, if I even can get to a proper door in the first place, since all doors around here lead to bogus places, and let's not forget-" 

Kwan bopped Danny over the head with the manual. "Relax, Danny," he interrupted. "Let's not forget that you are  _Phantom_ , and I've seen Phantom drag the entire world through a crisis. This? This is peanuts compared to that, and you were sixteen at the time. We'll find a door, we'll be alright, and NASA can help repair and reposition the station. Emphasis on the  _we_ , because this time, you're not alone. Now, get some sleep so we can get this show on the road." 

Danny eyeballed Kwan for a few more seconds before he gave up and with a sigh let himself fall back. This time the rings appeared and black-haired Danny nestled himself deeper inside the sleeping bag. 

"Thanks, Kwan," he finally said. Kwan kept on reading the manual and this time within minutes there came no more rustling from the sleeping bag. Kwan suddenly understood why Danny kept himself surrounded by old friends. Sometimes he needed to be hit by a clue by four, whether it was in the form of a manual, a Thermos or a class ring. 

 


	7. Space Australia

The heat was the first thing they noticed the second the unlikely pair finally escaped the Ghost Zone. Judging by the sun it was noon and they could see the endless blue expanse over their heads. Along with several tall buildings, all metal and glass and reflecting the sunlight and clear blue sky. 

The portal opened up next to a garage door on a dead-end street. The swirling green portal to the Ghost Zone was quite conspicuous, but at the moment there was no human being in sight. 

"Well, it certainly looks modern," Kwan said as he looked around. Two high-rises stood on either side of them, with a road slightly tilting upwards before disappearing around a bend. Behind them was a white metal gate. Danny landed next to Kwan, but didn't turn back into a human yet. 

"A bit too modern," he remarked. "Let's check out the skyline and see if we can figure out where we are." 

Kwan pointed at a sign affixed to one of the high-rises. "Holbrook Avenue, Danny. So at least it's English. And hey, it only took us three hours to find this door. It looks a lot more promising than that caveman house."

Danny made a non-committal sound and turned invisible before he left Kwan's side. Kwan walked further up the road, looking for any sign that could show him where the portal had led them this time. Well, he'd already found one sign, but a discarded newspaper or something equally information-heavy would do the trick just fine. But sadly the street was clean. The universe didn't make it that easy for dimension / time travelers. 

There was, however, a car parked halfway on the curb. Cars had never truly held an interest to Kwan. Some guys would blow all their money on the latest body mods, but Kwan was often bored when they endlessly raved about their turbochargers and whatnot. Two of his college friends were gear heads and when they got together it was like they spoke a whole other language. 

But even Kwan saw that this car was out of the ordinary. It looked like somebody had stolen it from a prototype show and left it illegally parked on this dead-end street. The car hugged the ground and had a long nose, the headlights incorporated into the frame to make it look smooth. It looked like a horizontal drop of water, thin at the front and bulbous at the back. From a distance it looked white, but when he moved closer he noticed a honeycomb pattern underneath the gleaming finish. The windows were tinted black and Kwan saw no door handles. 

"Definitely not Kansas," Kwan muttered to himself. A cold feeling at his elbow alerted him to the presence of Danny Phantom.

"I know where we are," the half-ghost announced with a happy note to his voice. Before Kwan could ask the obvious question Danny answered, "Sydney, Australia!" 

"How come you're so sure?" Kwan asked, momentarily forgetting the strange car as he turned to look at Danny. 

"Because I can see the opera house from here," Danny promptly answered. He pointed at a location beyond the buildings. "And I'm guessing that's where we can find stores. C'mon."

  


Before Kwan could protest Danny hauled him into the air, quickly rising above the buildings around them. And it was true, Kwan could see the famous building across the water. But he also saw a lot more. He wasn't familiar with the skyline of Sydney, but even he knew that the Sydney on his Earth didn't have a giant half-round building behind the opera house. Nor were there mag-lev trains and that many prototype cars on the roads. 

"Uh, d'you notice anything strange?" Danny asked after a few seconds of flying. Kwan nodded even though Danny couldn't see it.

"I think we're in the future," he answered the question. Danny was smart, no denying that, but he could be a bit oblivious. Must be hereditary, because his parents were the same. Suddenly he wondered if Danny's parents even knew that Phantom had lived under their roof. He guessed they did, since they teamed up with him. But he distinctly remembered the Fentons hunting Phantom, calling him all kinds of names. He filed it away under 'must ask later' and focused on the situation at hand. 

"I don't know how far into the future we are, but at least we haven't evolved beyond the use of cars," Kwan said. 

"Maybe we can find a currency exchange and get ourselves some dollars to buy that transformer," Danny said. Kwan could point out three things that could go wrong if they did that, but Danny interrupted his thoughts. "And you are so not buying a sports almanac." 

With that non-sequitur Danny landed them on the road next to the opera house, turning them visible again when no one looked their way. 

"I always wanted to go to Australia," Kwan mentioned. He hoped they wouldn't stand out too bad with their jumpsuits, especially with the NASA logo on it. That logo was known throughout the world, and things could go wrong if NASA still existed and got wind of their existence. Temporal paradoxes, maybe even erasure of the! universe! itself! 

"But this isn't quite what you had in mind," Danny finished the sentence for him. With a quick glance around he transformed back into a human and led the way across the street. The high building turned out to be a luxurious hotel, and the porter nicely pointed them into the direction of the nearest shopping center. As they walked across the avenues Kwan had trouble not bowling people over, because he looked everywhere but at the sidewalk. 

The cars looked like the prototype he had first seen, albeit with small differences. They silently zoomed across the street and the humans inside were busy with everything but driving. But there were no accidents and on the larger streets the cars moved as one. Computer-controlled driving, then. Plenty of trees adorned the avenues and by the looks of it the two astronauts had dropped into high summer. People wore weather-appropriate clothing, which meant that there was plenty of women flesh to look at. The women looked unanimously pretty and the guys were tanned. All kinds of people walked on the streets, from businessmen with suits and ties (that hadn't changed much) to young children with ear pods plugged in. Kwan saw inexplicable bars on the hems of the clothing. They varied from green to yellow to red and Kwan got an inkling what they were used for when he saw a guy's bar go from yellow to red. At the moment he was on the phone, or he was crazy, because he talked into thin air. 

"Hold on, my energy is low. Let me cell you back." 

But he held no physical phone. He swiftly walked away and found a sunny spot on the sidewalk. He leaned against a building and began talking again. "Retype. Hi love, it's me. Yeah. About that room-" 

Kwan's hope for humanity went up with every step he took. It looked like the world had managed to turn itself around and get used to durable energy sources. Or at least, this part of the world did. Maybe there still existed hungry ice bears on non-existent polar caps, but this future looked promising. If it even was the future of the Earth he called home. But since there was no way to find out, he just smiled at the cute girls. 

Once they arrived in the shopping center it didn't take them long to find an electrical store. Unlike English China this store advertised its prices blatantly. They still didn't have a penny on them, but Kwan had good hope they could overcome that hurdle this time as well. Once inside they were greeted by an employee of the store, wearing a green polo shirt with the logo of the store on it and black slacks. Kwan had a bit of trouble understanding him, but after a few sentences his ears could decipher the accent. 

"Good afternoon, gentlemen, can I help you with anything? You look like two working fellows. Have you seen our new line of drillbots yet? Half the work, all the benefits." 

"Good afternoon," Danny greeted back, ignoring the blatant advertising. "We're looking for a transformer." 

The employee took a few seconds to answer, but by the way his face fell Kwan could tell that perhaps this wasn't going to be as easy as he'd hoped. 

"I'm sorry, we don't carry those. Perhaps you can try the antiques store down the road, sometimes they get a few in." 

"Thank you for your time," Danny answered and immediately turned around. The employee stepped into Kwan's field of vision and gestured towards a rack of merchandise. 

“Are you sure I can't interest you in the drillbot? If you're going to hang that transformer on the wall, you have to drill-."

"Trust me buddy," Kwan interrupted him, "in our case, drilling holes in our wall would be a bad idea." 

Danny chuckled at that statement and they made their way out the store. They found the antiques store in a side-alley of the main street. They could've also followed their noses, because even this store carried that unique antiques store smell. A mix of hundreds of books packed together, furniture varnish and the dust which invariably settled on the objects inside the store. Even in the future there was enough oak  f urniture and old children's books to fill the store. 

The astronauts tried to keep their gazes averted in case they saw something they weren't supposed to and tried to find one of the employees manning the store. A young man in a freshly-pressed shirt came over to them. His teeth were too white but his smile was genuine.

"Can I help you find anything?" he asked. 

"We're looking for a transformer," Kwan informed the guy. The young man actually grabbed his chin as he thought but ultimately he turned to a computer terminal. After a few touches his face lit up and he led the two men towards a corner of the store. There were all kinds of electronics here, along with colored blocks hidden inside glass cases. A wind-up ballerina twirled endlessly with the cheap music from the box drifting over the section.

"Here you are, sir," he said, pushing a toy in Kwan's hand. Kwan had been focused on the ballerina and it took him a few seconds to recognize the toy robot.

"An electrical transformer," Kwan explained, chuckling at the confusion. He handed the toy back to the employee, who put it back on the shelf.

"So sorry," he said, and Danny groaned in disappointment. "By law we're not allowed to carry electrical components. Not since that fire in-"

"Yeah, yeah, we remember," Danny cut him off, waving his hands. "Thank you for your time." 

Together they trooped out of the store and back to the main street. They gathered behind a billboard placed in the middle of the sidewalk to talk the situation over. 

"So much for that," Danny said. "Maybe we should head back to find another door closer to our time, where they can sell us a transformer. The electrical kind." 

Kwan's eyes widened at that statement. "Are you kidding me? It took us three hours to find this door. We haven't even tried a market or any other store." 

Danny's shoulders slumped. "I know, I know. I'm just tired. And kind of hungry." 

Kwan gently punched Danny's shoulder. "Hey, come on, we've only got to get this one thing and then we get to go home. Or at least repair the ISS, then go back to our mission. If we can get it back in the right place, and - you know what, we just have to get this one thing and then we can take the next step. So, let's find the next store." 

Kwan set out and Danny followed. Together they checked the stores, questioning the employees, but nobody carried it anymore. Kwan averted his eyes from plenty of new equipment, citing the mantra ‘it’s dangerous to know’.

They stood inside a store, questioning an employee about the current used to see if they could make it fit somehow when another conversation between an employee and a customer caught their attention.

"Hey man, what's the date?" the customer asked. He was dressed in a shining silver suit with red tie and red shoes. He held a briefcase in one hand together with a handheld device. He used his free hand to gesture around the store. "And what happened to the plasma screens? Don't you make them anymore?" 

"The date is August 19th, and PerlinCorp stopped the production of plasma screens twenty years ago. Can I help you with anything else?" 

The eccentric man regarded the device in his hand before he turned back to the employee. "What year man, what year?!" 

The employee gave the man a half-grin and duly replied, "twenty-one oh five, sir. Perhaps I can show you our future line of TVs instead?" The employee gestured towards a line of shifting images, although Kwan couldn't see any TVs, only projections on the wall. He quickly averted his eyes from the tantalizing technology and focused on the current objective of currents instead. 

Two minutes later they walked out of the store, sadly none the wiser what they could do to make a transformer from the future work inside the limited framework of their own technology. Danny jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. "What was that guy babbling about?" he asked. "The conspiracy theory guy," he elaborated. Kwan shrugged and sidestepped a woman dressed in a dirty overall before he replied.

"Maybe the guy's a nut. And at least we know what year it is now. Not that it does us any good, but still, nice to know." 

The main shopping street spilled out onto a square surrounded by trees with a huge fountain in the middle. In the fountain small children played and their parents sat on the steps of the fountain, handing out food and warnings, occasionally getting splashed by their offspring. Cherubs and unicorns in the center of the fountain sprayed water into the air. More people, families and workers alike sat in the shadow cast by a large tower beside the square, leaving only walking people in the sunny parts. 

But the strangest part were the dozens of people roaming on the outer edge of the square. Kwan saw women in Victorian dresses, inquiring to the whereabouts of their fiancées, standing right next to a man who looked like he'd survived a plane crash. Bleeps and blips sounded from the various devices they held. One of them scanned a prototype car parked on the edge with an awfully familiar device. "Scans show no result, captain," he added for the benefit of a pot-bellied man standing next to him. There were men in jumpsuits, a woman wearing a long brown trench coat, someone with a sign which said 'need money for karate lessons to free my family from my evil overlord'. There was lots of silver and other shiny cloth around. The people seemed happy acting out whatever it was they represented or celebrated that day. 

"Let's go see what that is all about," Danny said, taking Kwan by the arm and steering him towards the group of people. As soon as they got within range people began to notice the pair. 

"Hey, astronauts from my time!" one of them shouted. He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt which read 'it was Earth all along!' in bold lettering. "Do you know of a way back?" the young adult demanded. Kwan couldn't think what to say to that, but luckily Danny had experience in the lying department. 

"No, sorry dude, we're as stranded as you are." 

The young man deflated visibly and joined his group of friends again, all dressed in an awfully familiar way. A woman clambered on top of a camping chair and got their attention through a megaphone. Well, it didn't look like the megaphones Kwan was familiar with, but it amplified her voice nonetheless. 

"Are you all ready to make this day more surreal?" she asked the crowd, who roared back in confirmation. "Then let's go and enjoy this day!" 

Not the most rousing of speeches, Kwan decided, but the crowd of people quickly dispersed all across the square, some disappearing in the streets leading to the square. 

"Any clue?" Kwan asked as he turned to Danny. The half-ghost carried a relieved smile which made Kwan prompt him again. Danny snapped back to attention, although his eyes still followed a woman in a Victorian dress.

"I've heard Tuck talk about it, but I had no idea it became this popular. This could really help us." 

Kwan sighed before he once again had to grab Danny's attention by laying a hand on his shoulder. "Enough with the vaguebooking, how is a guy in a top hat going to help us?" 

"Because it's Pretend to be a Time Traveler day here in Sydney," Danny answered. "People dress up and go into the streets, pretending to be from another time period, or a dystopian future or something. Tucker wanted to do it, but on that day it was pouring, so he skipped it. I don't know if he ever went, but it did sound like fun." 

"And because we're the real deal-" Kwan got interrupted by Danny, who gestured at the young man in jeans who they had spoken to earlier. 

"We don't look so out of place and people won't think we're funny in the head if we ask where we can get a 21st century transformer, or how to get money or any other information we might need." 

Kwan was silent as he processed that, but ultimately he threw a huge grin Danny's way. "You geeks are finally useful for something," he joked. 

"Why, thank you, mister Jock sir," Danny mocked right back. Together they set off towards the nearest group of Australians who weren't in period dress. 

XXX

Being part of a group of geeks was a new experience for Kwan. Sure, he'd been surrounded by nerds the moment he became part of NASA, but there was a subtle difference between the two. Kwan hadn’t developed the antennae needed for that distinction, so he called everybody 'computer guys' and nobody had bashed his brains in yet (or hacked into his private e-mail account), so he figured he was in the clear. 

Kwan witnessed some memorable conversations between a time traveler geek and an oblivious person. One was dressed in clothes which looked like he had just outrun a nuclear explosion. He handed people small black cubes and told them: "Take this, you'll know when you need it." The expression on the people's faces were hilarious, as the dystopian guy vanished soon after that exchange. 

A group of five stood huddled in clothes made from (fake) animal skins and argued about who set the wrong century on the machine. They even carried spears and a digital wristwatch. 

There were subtle ones, two guys gawking at newspapers dressed in a t-shirt with a tie, and there were the obvious ones, such as the lone woman wandering around the square, looking dazed in her tattered clothes. Or maybe that was a homeless woman, Kwan wasn't too sure. 

"I think we should split up, ask as many people as possible where we can get a transformer now that nobody thinks we're weird, and meet back here in an hour," Danny suggested. Kwan nodded as his eyes  tracked a boy who tried to pay with a  bottle cap at a food stand. 

"Sounds like a plan. See you in an hour," Kwan replied, and the two of them drifted apart on the square. 

It was the first time in almost twenty days that Kwan was alone. Well, not in the vicinity of Danny, at least. And it was most welcome, especially after the last grueling 48 hours. He still suspected his stress levels would set off many scanners, but the sunlit square was a pleasant place. More pleasant than the dank backstreets of the English village they'd visited before, or alternate history China where he had to share his mind with a half-ghost. Compared to those spots, the middle of geek-day was a true vacation. 

Full of optimism Kwan set himself to the task of getting as much information as possible out of the unsuspecting Australians. Under the guise of fake time traveler he approached two women, one of which was chatting away on what looked to be a cell phone. They both wore blue sundresses and were clearly twins, with even their hair braided the same way.

"Excuse me, can I ask you ladies something?" Kwan asked. The woman not occupied with blabbing to thin air turned to Kwan. She smiled a dimpled smile when she gave him a quick once-over and her blue eyes seemed to brighten.

"Go ahead," she said.

So Kwan explained that he was looking for an electrical transformer. The woman looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then pointed at a street leading away from the square.

"Try the 3d-bank," she suggested. 

"I'm sorry, the 3d-bank?" Kwan asked, making his confusion as transparent as possible. That made the blonde woman's smile grow even larger. Kwan suspected she was a time traveler wanna-be as well, so she played along beautifully. 

"You can get anything printed on a 3d-printer at that bank, as long as you have a blueprint. You do have a blueprint, don't you?" 

Kwan scratched his cheek as he pretended to think. "Yeah, I think I left it back at the station- at home," he amended his words. The woman chuckled. 

"And where is hom e ?" 

For that, Kwan didn't have to act. "So, so far away," he said, gazing into the distance with a pensive look on his face. Okay, maybe a little bit of acting. "So, so far," he repeated. "But I can get anything printed?" 

The woman nodded, jerking her head towards the street. "Anything," she confirmed. 

"Then I thank you very much, ma'am, you've just saved the universe." Kwan bowed and quick-walked away from her, leaving the woman laughing. He bet that they pretended to be doppelgangers or clones or people from alternate dimensions or something. His thoughts ground to a halt. What if they did manage to land in an alternate dimension? Had another Kwan Lin existed here? What if he had also chosen the career of an astronaut, but there was no Phantom to push the station into the Ghost Zone? Did this Kwan die in outer space, or did he choose to be something else entirely? 

Kwan shook his head to rid himself of these thoughts. Such musings were better left to geeks and nerds and everything that fell in between, he decided. He only had one hour to get as much information as possible, and time was better spent on getting home than on thinking about poor dead Kwan hanging in space. 

XXX

It felt nice to have a full hour to himself, Kwan decided. Fresh faces, attractive women, time traveler geeks, it all just was so ... new. Even the buildings seemed to sparkle, white as they were. It felt really nice to get to stretch his legs again, conversing with other people, trying to get them to spill the beans on the technicalities of this universe. He talked to a couple of tourists, another time traveler geek, he even spotted from afar the 3d-bank the first girl had pointed him towards. The accent of the people he spoke to was hard to understand and some words were unfamiliar to him, but Kwan got the gist of it, he hoped. Because words like 'dakila' and 'makaluma' were quite a ways from his vocabulary. 

With a plan in his mind Kwan strode back to the square, looking for the relatively short stature of Phantom. He wondered if Danny had used his ghost powers to extract information from people. He guessed not, the risk of discovery was too high. If Phantom had existed here in the first place. Kwan wasn't about to go looking for that, he vaguely remembered the mess Marty McFly got himself in while time traveling. Knowledge of the future might not immediately destroy all of mankind and everything in existence, but Kwan wasn't one to tempt fate. 

Finally Kwan spotted Danny's black hair in the crowd and he made his way to his colleague. Danny bid the man he was speaking to a good day and turned to Kwan.

"Summarize your plan for me," Danny said the second he looked in Kwan's eyes. They really had been stuck together on that station for too long. 

"We get money, I haven't figured out how yet, and we use the blueprint to get a transformer printed at the 3d-bank." 

"And I have an idea where we can get money. We make a great team, Kwan." Danny playfully punched Kwan in the shoulder. Kwan threw him a suffering look.

"Optimism is my shtick, Phantom." 

"Hey, I'm the unofficial leader of team Phantom, I need to keep my subjects motivated. Anyway, there are still pawn shops around in this century. If say we go visit one and see what we can sell." 

Kwan jerked his chin towards a street leading out of the square. "Any idea where we can find one?" 

Danny nodded and started walking, Kwan falling into step beside him. "I got directions, even better. Though that guy looked panicked that I didn't have my computer with me. He kept offering to take me to the police station and report it missing." 

It took a bit of a walk to get to the pawn shop. Less and less shop fronts littered the buildings and slowly the area turned into a residential one. The street meandered around buildings and twice they had to backtrack until they were sure the directions made sense. Finally they wound up in a small square hidden behind an archway. The sun was blocked by a big tree with low-hanging branches, and patches of grass piped up between the grey bricks on the ground. 

Kwan expected some kind of organic store, but Danny's directions had paid off: in front of them was a shop window, proclaiming in bold letters that they'd take anything off your hands in exchange for money. In smaller letters it also told the viewer that they paid in cash. Apparently that had become a rarity if the shop window displayed it so boldly.

The two of them entered the store and were immediately assaulted by the smell of old stuff. Somehow that was still the same across the century, the rich fragrance of dust and leather with a hint of metal. It was hard for Kwan not to look around too much, because it was so tempting to learn more about future technologies. What did they run on, what theories got implemented into hardware and which ideas became worthless in the 21st century, it was all laid out in this shop. Chrome and black was still a common design in electronics, Kwan noticed before he turned to the cashier of the pawn shop. 

He, unlike many of the men Kwan had seen outside, was rather homely. His teeth weren't blindingly white and a thin scar ran from his brow to his cheek. He had a dark shadow around his jaw and his nails were jagged. 

"Can I help you?" he asked when he saw the two astronauts approach his counter. Danny took the lead in this conversation, explaining that they needed money and would like to sell something. 

"Hot air?" the man asked after Danny failed to immediately procure what item he wanted to sell. "Are you one of those time traveler types?" he asked a few seconds later, his hazel eyes narrowing in suspicion. 

"No sir," Kwan interjected, "just customers."

Danny upended the bag slung over his shoulders on the counter. The man's eyes lit up when he spotted the jeans Kwan had stuffed into the bag roll out amidst the other contents. He immediately snatched it and examined it up close, stretching the fabric between his hands. He turned it over and over, ignoring the handheld computer and first-aid kit. "I haven't seen denim in years," he said. He took a few steps towards a computer terminal with some kind of box underneath it. He put the jeans into the box and tapped a button. A beep sounded and a  s econd later text appeared on the screen. 

"And it's real denim." He eyed Danny warily as he retrieved the jeans and put it back on the counter. "Did you pirate it from the fashion museum?" 

Danny quickly shook his head and raised his eyebrows, trying to look innocent. It didn't really work. "No, I'd never steal. Besides, wouldn't those things be chipped or marked or something?" 

"Yes," the man had to admit. "But these aren't marked at all. I've never even heard of this brand." He fingered the clothing tag before looking up sharply. "Is it from a 3dp?" 

"A what?" Kwan had to ask. The man's accent made him hard to follow, but now he flung around future terms and Kwan had lost track of the conversation some two save points back. 

"3d-printer, ya stick. Did you print it off one of those fancy things at the bank?" 

"No sir," Danny said, still failing to look innocent. "It uh, belonged to my grandfather. Believe it or not, we found it inside a working freezer. That's why you can still see some stains on the waistband. Imagine that, a hundred year old stain." 

The ease of the lie astounded Kwan. But the man seemed to buy it. He tapped some more keys and the terminal beeped again before spitting out more information on the jeans. Kwan hoped that carbon dating wasn't being used daily on these items, because he didn't know how Danny was going to lie his way out of explaining old jeans which hadn't aged a hundred years. But the man just grunted and refolded the jeans.

"It's stained and the fabric is wearing thin around the knees. I can give you fifty for it." 

Kwan realized he had no idea what they could buy with that amount of money. An ice-cream or a watch or a car? Inflation was always going on, a dime fifty years back could get you a whole lot more than in the Amity Park he was familiar with. But Danny seemed to know, because he made a grab for the jeans.

"That's your opening bid? I expect at least two hundred." 

The man narrowed his eyes at Danny and especially at his hand holding the jeans. 

"Sixty," he growled. Kwan took a step back to give Danny more room and determinedly kept his eyes averted from the electronics inside the store. Danny gave a counter-offer and the two of them haggled until they hit a price they were both happy with.

"And that makes a hundred and thirty. Are you sure you don't want wired to your account?" the man asked one final time, clutching the strange money in his hand. Danny held out his hand and shook his head.

"You advertise 'we give cash' on your window, dude, so give us the money." 

The man finally relented and handed the crispy bills to Danny. They looked like they just rolled off the printer, they had never even been folded. Kwan spotted a landmark he recognized on one of the bills. He had no clue what an Australian dollar looked like back home, but this money looked a bit fake, with all of the different colors and sizes of the bills. But it was money they could use, so Danny carefully tucked it into one of the many pockets of his jumpsuit. 

"Thank you," Danny said, slinging his duffle bag over his shoulder. The moment they were outside Kwan clapped him on the shoulder. 

"No idea you were that good at haggling. I'd have let you take over back in China, maybe you could've negotiated three propellers instead of two," Kwan complimented. Danny pulled the money from his pocket and counted it. 

"Try haggling for your sanity with Vlad, it's an excellent crash course in the art of negotiating," Danny said with a small grin. Kwan took a few seconds to parse the name. Vlad Masters, the ghost who impersonated a human and even managed to win the mayoral election. After his failure to stop the Disasteroid he disappeared from public view. Dalv almost went bankrupt and had to merge with Axiom Labs, where it became apparent that Vlad Masters had been quite an unscrupulous businessman. Another scandal to add to the pile, because Vlad Masters wasn't a man anyone in the world wanted to associate with anymore. Well, he wasn't really a man, was he? All this time, he was... a... 

"Vlad Masters," Kwan began, unsure how to vocalize his suspicion. "Was he... He was impersonating a human, but he wasn't really, was he?" 

Danny stopped walking and turned towards Kwan. "That's a lot of 'was', Kwan. But no, he doesn't impersonate a human, he is one. Half of one, anyway." 

"So he's another half-ghost. How many of you are there, anyway?" 

Danny shrugged. "Two, as far as I know. Me and him, and sadly we've been rivals since the day we met." 

Kwan mentally balanced Danny's heroism against the picture the papers presented of Masters, an unethical genius billionaire playboy, and he could see why even the mention of the man's name made Danny stop in his tracks. 

"Do you know what happened to him after the Disasteroid?" 

And there it was again, the other hand which Danny still kept clenched so tightly. There was a little too much nonchalance in his voice, his eyes didn't quite meet Kwan's, his tone became flatter. Kwan had seen Danny lie up close enough times now to recognize the signals. 

"I don't know. I guess he moved to South America or something, he's fluent in Spanish, so he can start over there." 

A too detailed answer, Kwan was sure of it now. Danny knew where Vlad was, maybe even what he was doing, but he thought Kwan didn't need to be in the know. For a second Kwan wanted to confront Danny about the lie, about every single thing Danny had kept from him while they were supposed to be a tight-knit team. They needed to be able to complete each other's sentences, and Kwan had thought they were. But now all he could rely on to be truthful was himself. 

Then again, the devil on his shoulder reasoned, did he really need to know where Vlad Masters was? He wasn't going to do anything to either help or hurt the man, he held no particular grudge towards Vlad for almost destroying the Earth. And how could Danny live a relatively normal life if he told everybody he worked with that he transformed into an undead specter and fought ghosts in his spare time? He, like everybody on this planet, had a right to privacy. 

The hurt of being lied to still stung though, so Kwan wasn't sure how he eventually would handle this secret and every little lie tied into it, but for now he let the location of Vlad Masters slide. 

"We should get to the 3d-bank before they close," Kwan said instead, and started walking. Danny quickly followed him after pocketing the money. 

  



	8. Overzealous compatibility

Kwan insisted on walking instead of flying, because the directions he'd gotten from two gentle older men only made sense on ground level. And he could gawk at the future some more, although he didn't use the second argument to convince Danny to stay grounded. They still drew stares from people, but when they got closer to the square they'd set out from the stares turned into half-smiles as people assumed they were part of the fake time travelers crowd.

"So that should be the second street left," Kwan pointed out. Danny stood on the tips of his toes to look where Kwan pointed. It occurred to Kwan that Danny was small compared to the people on the sidewalk. He knew the guy wouldn't get asked to fetch things from the top shelf in supermarkets, but he wasn't that small. Apparently genetic modification had become fashionable or something in the food turned people into giants, because even Kwan, by no means a small person, had trouble looking over the heads of people.

"Third street on the right, hang a left at the roundabout," Kwan said as they approached those streets, making sure he memorized them correctly. They passed more offices, infinitely interesting shop windows and even a food cart selling kapsalons. His stomach let him know that a snack wouldn't be unwelcome, but Danny pressed on so Kwan followed.

The 3d-bank was situated at another square, smaller than the one where the time travelers had met. It was a square square with trees offering shade along the edges and a fountain off-center. It was blessedly free of cars and a couple of kids played near the fountain. Something about that fountain tickled Kwan's memory. He discerned the shape underneath the water spewing from the round thing high up in the air and laughed as he realized what it was.

"I don't believe it," Danny said, his eyes wide.

"It's one of those statues. One of your statues," Kwan said with a huge grin. So they actually stood in the future of their timeline, on a small square in the middle of Sydney. Wait a sec, Sydney wasn't...

"But it's not the capital," Danny said before Kwan could finish his thought. "There shouldn't be one over here."

Kwan shrugged. "Maybe they bought it from Melbourne. Err, Canberra. Maybe they repurposed your statues into fountains and gave them all to Australia, who knows. We're in the future!"

"Stop saying it's my statue," Danny hissed back, a frown on his face.

"Aye, but it is. Stand next to it and-"

"People might recognize me, and how well do think that will go over? I can't exactly pass myself off as my great-grandson without knowing what happened to me, can I?" Danny began to powerwalk across the square towards the 3d-bank. Kwan resisted the urge to heave a deep sigh and followed Danny.

"Come on, how many people are going to link you to the ghost who saved the world?"

"One is enough," Danny replied curtly. Kwan sensed Danny had talked about this many times before, the answers came so easily, and had the right amount of anger to get through any objections Kwan could have made.

"In fact, why didn't anyone link you to Phantom before? You don't really change your face when you, y'know, transform."

Danny pulled Kwan away from the entrance to the bank and sat him down on a bench underneath one of the trees. He looked all riled up, a frown apparent on his face and his shoulders high. Kwan even saw a minor green glint to his eyes.

"Listen, I can't afford for any more people to know who I am, Kwan," Danny said in low tones. "If there's a statue of me in this dimension, I might still be around."

Kwan cocked his head as he thought about that. "But we're a hundred years into the future. You can't possibly be still alive."

The green grew and reminded Kwan that Danny wasn't completely human anymore.

"Exactly," Danny confirmed. He looked away as he continued, but still his voice was soft and low. "I don't know what'll happen to me when I die, but chances are I'll become a full ghost. Which means that I might I run into myself here. And trust me, you do not want that to happen. Who knows who or what I've turned into."

There was an ominous tone in Danny's voice, one which held the promise of an intriguing story, if not an unpleasant one. But now was sadly not the time, so Kwan nodded. "Gotcha, don't compare you to Phantom anymore in public. Let's get into the bank and out of the statue's vicinity, how's that sound?"

"Like a plan," Danny answered and Kwan felt relieved to see the supernatural green disappear from Danny's eyes. It didn't belong there.

XXX

When he was small his mother had read Kwan a picture book of Mayor Price and the City Hall of Snoozeville. One of the pictures had shown the inside of the city hall, and Kwan was strongly reminded of that the moment he stepped inside. Thick white columns took up the sides of the room, the ceiling was azure, as was the mosaic inlaid in the floor. Due to the many people inside Kwan couldn't see what the mosaic was supposed to be. Yellow lines marked the path people had to follow to get to the teller windows at the other side of the bank. The building smelled strongly of metal and plastic but Kwan immediately forgot that as he spotted the rows upon rows of machinery stuffed on the left wall. These had to be the 3d-printers. The air rang with clinking sounds as endless items spewed forth from the printers. Tiny heads dripped liquids onto a plate and as time passed the plastics and metals settled and became recognizable items.

The printers sat behind a clear perspex plate, each one connected to a terminal facing the lobby. The yellow lines on the floor steered the people first towards the teller windows before curving towards the terminals. Kwan watched as a man entered a code and subsequently a cookie jar made of a kind of plastic got deposited down a hatch after being printed off. The man lifted it, rubbed his thumb across the smooth surface and nodded to himself before exiting the bank.

Inside the bank the heat was far less oppressive and Kwan noticed that his jumpsuit was stuck to his lower back. He gave himself a surreptitious sniff and pulled a face. He definitely needed a shower after all this was over, because the sponge bath he'd given himself hadn't gotten rid of China's alley stench. No wonder the couple in front of him shuffled forward until they practically hugged the people in front of them. Oh well, nothing he could do about it now.

"You think we got enough money?" Kwan asked Danny. A hundred and thirty dollars suddenly didn't sound like much in the face of this technology. Danny pointed at a large screen above the teller windows. It showed an ad and out of habit Kwan had ignored it, but now he focused on the images. In clear lettering which had depth to them it read: 'First item for just ninety dollars!'

There were some addendums and small letters involved, but if Kwan read it right, as newcomers they could get the transformer for a hundred dollars. That was a mighty nice deal, he decided. They even had some money left!

"Yeah, that'll do," Kwan said with a smile. "Good thing your bartering skills are better than your temper skills."

Danny smiled at Kwan at the jab. During their time on the station Danny had shown amazing restraint, but on Earth the guy had a habit of making a hurtful remark first and apologizing later. Now Kwan recognized it as Phantom's so-called 'witty banter', but in human form it came across as less banter and more snide. Kwan realized he held Phantom and Fenton at different standards and mentally he shook his head and merged the two. Every characteristic of both forms was one person, but as Phantom it stood out far less when he commented on ghosts than when he was a human, for some reason. There was a disconnect.

"Berserk mode can be useful," Danny remarked. Kwan opened his mouth to reply somewhere along the line that it sure made him stronger in fights, but the chat they had on the bench barged its way into his brain.

Instead he offered a lame "Yeah". They shuffled forwards as the line moved and after a few minutes of waiting it was their turn.

"Welcome to Triotal Banks, what can we print for you today?" the woman behind the teller window asked. She looked like his Aunt Trudy, Kwan decided. Red dyed hair, a bit frumpy clothes and a voice as if she'd gargled with pocket knives.

"Hello, we'd like to print an electrical transformer from early 21st century. We found it on this device," Danny said as he handed over the handheld device Kwan had brought along. It contained all of the manuals and schematics of the station, in case of emergency they could use this as a guide to repair the equipment.

The woman squinted at the handheld and touched the screen. She looked bewildered when nothing happened. Danny chuckled and plucked it from her fingers. "You have to use these buttons to scroll through, but here's the blueprint we'd like printed off. Can you do that?"

Danny showed the blueprint to her and once again she squinted at the screen. She took it from Danny and put it on a clear rectangle made of glass on her counter. The device beeped once before showing an error dialogue box. Kwan's heart started beating faster. There were only four of those devices, and Kwan had repaired one already. They were very useful, but also buggy and back then it took him the better part of an afternoon before he repaired the plug-in the device was throwing a wobbly over.

The woman harrumphed and tried placing it again, but it merely showed the same box.

"My computer can't read this device," she said. Danny gave an awkward laugh.

"Yeah, I just realized maybe this technology isn't compatible with yours. Can you access the files at least, through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi maybe?"

Trudy, as Kwan mentally called her, pushed a button and another teller window opened up to their left. The person behind Danny and Kwan stepped up to that window. Trudy jiggled her thick arms a bit as she settled down more firmly onto her seat. There was a glint in her eyes and Kwan realized they'd just made her day. It had to be boring to sit at a window and process blueprints all day.

"Alright, let's see what I can do for you," Trudy said. "Please wait for a byte." She smiled as if she'd made a joke and set to work. As she did so, she talked to herself.

"It's an old handheld, so the files are not anywhere on the cloud. Let's see if it has LTA."

Trudy grabbed a small pointed penlight from a drawer and shone a red laser light at the handheld, aiming it at the screen. No errors this time, but no results either.

"So no laser access," Trudy summarized. She flipped the device over and read the faded sticker on the back of the device, narrowing her eyes as she did so. "It doesn't have the 802.78ao standard, it's... 802.11n, really? That's old. But that gives me an idea."

She got up and disappeared into the back for a few minutes. When she returned, she carried an old scratched box. No, scratch that, it looked like a router. She placed it on the glass rectangle on the counter and blue and green lights sputtered to life. With a few taps on her screen she called up the settings. Kwan knew he should look away from all this future tech, but the way Trudy expertly handled this problem was nothing short of amazing. If presented with a hundred year old tech Kwan knew he'd be lost, but Trudy took care of it with such expertise.

"Right, it says here that 802.11n was on 2.4 gigahertz, so if I throttle the 80 gigahertz from this hive, like that, and search for the broadcasting channels..."

A broad grin erupted on Trudy's face as the handheld pinged. "What's the password?" she asked, turning the device over for Danny to enter the code. Danny did so and Trudy boldly snatched it back, excited to see if she'd managed to connect the two totally incompatible devices. She tapped her screen a few more times and to Kwan's relief the broad grin stayed.

"I've copied the files to the hive. If you give me your account, I can transfer the files and you access them through the cloud."

Oops, they hadn't counted on that.

"Don't worry about that, we only need the blueprint for the transformer. Can you access that file?" Danny asked with a winning smile. Trudy frowned at the screen as she tapped it a few times. Her voice took on a tone of regret.

"All I see are corrupt files, gentlemen."

Kwan's face fell. He realized that just because Trudy could get the files from the device didn't mean her software could read it. It was hard to even access old text files one generation of computers ago, let alone a hundred years later. They now had the money, but not the technology needed to print the transformer off. Maybe there was a company that could convert the files, but that took time, which meant leaving the station alone even longer.

"Hold on, here's a file I can convert," Trudy interrupted Kwan's thoughts. "And here are some more. Sort by type, and let's see... You wanted the electrical transformer one, right?"

"Hallelujah for archive pdfs," Danny cried, drawing glances from the other people around them. "Yes, that's the one. Are you able to print it?"

"Well, I have to parse the blueprint through the modeling app, but... that's now done. I'd ask you if this was the correct item," she said and turned the screen for the astronauts to see, "but since it's a hundred years old I'd better just print it and see if it works." And she was right. Kwan had seen modeling software being used before, but the nitty-gritty of it escaped him. He saw an exploded view of the transformer he was familiar with in the manual, but this 22st century application had added a lot more information, ranging from the amount of silicon steel needed for the core to the cooling down time for each specific part. It was all a bit much to take in so Kwan merely nodded.

"Sounds like a plan. You're amazing, Tr- ma'am," Kwan said. Trudy smiled at him.

"No problem, it's what I'm trained to do. Although sadly I rarely get to use my knowledge, so let's see if I can wrangle a discount for making my day a little better," she said with a fat wink. "So that'll be... eighty-five dollars, please. If it doesn't work, swing by my window and you'll get a refund. And are you sure you don't want the files transferred?"

"Positive," Danny replied. "We only need this one thing, and thank you so much for helping us out. You've just saved the universe."

Trudy chuckled and handed the handheld back to Danny. "Have a nice day, and happy Apples Feast of course."

"Thanks," Kwan said, already turning towards the row of 3d-printers. They followed the yellow lines towards the printer spewing out the electrical transformer. It was a bunch of copper wires now, but the heads were working hard, using their flexible arms to thread the copper wires together. Kwan wondered how the computer knew how to build a transformer from the ground up, since that usually wasn't specified in the blueprint. Then again, maybe it could base the design on a database of technology, and all electronics followed the same principle: electricity had to run through it somehow.

The murmur of the people inside the bank came to a sudden stop as a cold draft invaded the room. Too cold for such a hot summer day. The people looked bewildered at each other and searched for the source. Danny's breath became visible and Kwan realized what that meant, his mind flashing back to the first time he saw that. That tech ghost showed up soon afterwards.

"Not good," Danny groaned, and Kwan couldn't help but agree with that sentiment.

XXX

Danny dropped lower, assuming a battle ready stance. His eyes flitted left and right and reminded Kwan immediately of Phantom. The shift in his mind was already made, now he had to find a way to shift his body. But with so many people around and no idea if the Danny of this world had announced his secret, Danny had to find a closet to hide for a few seconds.

Kwan spotted a perfect place and pointed at it. "Toilets," he announced at the very second two dozen ghosts phased through the wall. They floated high up in the air, forming a circle, surrounding the building on all sides. There were ghosts of all shapes, sizes and colors, ranging from a tiny bipedal antelope with bright red antlers to a ghost who had to have been a bouncer in his previous life, he was so 'roided. There were some similarities, however. All of the ghosts wore a bright blue sash with the letters 'GLF' embroidered on them, and they all carried a shield. The shield was bulky and covered in a white grainy film. Kwan noticed that the shield had multiple layers, all pressed together.

The humans inside the bank panicked when the ghosts phased through. A woman screamed right in Kwan's ear and sprinted towards the exit. She joined the stampede heading there, although people ran in other directions too, getting in each other's way. Kwan pressed himself against the perspex plate separating the printers from the public, gauging how long the printer would take to finish the transformer from the corner of his eye. It was still a pile of parts though, so instead he looked around for Danny. The familiar black hair had disappeared and Kwan hoped that Phantom would appear soon, because the ghosts descended and trapped the remaining humans in their huge circle.

The teller windows disappeared behind a glowing green ghost shield and metal plates slammed down within seconds, leaving the customers to fend for themselves.

Or not, Kwan thought as he noticed an array dropping down. It looked like a disco ball, although blue light shone from the many openings. A high whine permeated the air as it powered up and a second later spirals of blue shot out, covering every inch of the place. Ghosts got sucked in left and right, their shields dropping to the floor. One of the shields landed on a printer and it sprang apart, the tiny heads covering the perspex with liquid resources in an artful display.

A grinning ghost skeleton in a red toga had hid behind the enormous bouncer ghost currently being sucked in and it threw its shield at the array, slicing the cable supporting the ball in half. It dropped to the ground and the whine died down, as did the lights.

"Get them out," another ghost commanded. He looked frightening, with a wicked curved helmet on his head and frigid yellow eyes the only visible facial feature beneath the helmet's shadow. His sash showed the 'GLF' name alongside the rank 'commander'. Underneath the sash he wore a tweed jacket and ripped jeans, but Kwan knew authority when he saw it. Especially when it was printed on the sash.

The skeleton hurried to the ball and after some searching found the release button. He restored their ranks to full capacity and fell back into the circle formation. The ghosts settled on the ground, forcing the humans to scamper towards the center of the circle. There were maybe fifteen humans trapped. Kwan had to join them or risk getting smashed in the head with a very solid-looking shield. The printer spitting out the transformer still wasn't done.

Kwan hoped that Danny would show up soon, because these ghosts looked like the lethal kind: organized and prepared. Most of the ghost attacks in Amity Park were done by lone ghosts, with a single-minded goal. They were still dangerous, but you could get out of the way and live. The ghosts Kwan was familiar with barely even had a plan beyond 'hoard boxes' or 'punish those who change the lunch menu'. The last time an organized bunch of ghosts roamed the streets the whole city had been transported to the Ghost Zone, and Kwan really didn't want to relive the terror he'd felt that day. In the end Danny had saved them, but Kwan wondered if even Danny could hold his own against two dozen ghosts with unknown powers. The yellow-eyed ghost looked menacing on his own, let alone commanding others.

"Disable the device," yellow-eye said. The ghosts didn't need much encouragement to turn their multicolored blasts on the thermos-like ball and soon it got reduced to nothing but hot metal and plastic.

"The humans don't get to leave until Phantom has given himself up," yellow-eyed said next. His eyes roved over the gathered bunch of terrified humans, holding on to each other. A woman grabbed Kwan's arm and Kwan felt his radius and ulna getting ground together quite thoroughly.

"Lord, he doesn't appear to be here," the skeleton ghost remarked. Yellow-eye made a dismissive sound.

"If he's fled, he'll soon be back. Even he can't resist such... fear."

The ghosts cackled and the sound was horrible coming from all kinds of throats, misshapen or not there, all echoing in the air as if they stood inside a bathroom.

"In the meantime, why don't we scope out a new volunteer?" Yellow-eye casually ordered. Several ghosts soared down and advanced on the group. A man screamed and a woman joined him and they both elbowed themselves to the center of the group as if being on the outside meant certain death. Kwan noticed that the ghosts smirked as the energy of fear rippled outwards, reaching them. What the hell took Danny so long? And how was the woman hugging his arm so strong? She was tiny!

"I don't suppose any of you are ready to volunteer?" the skeleton ghost asked. As he got closer Kwan could read the title of 'captain' embroidered on his sash.

"Volunteer for what?" Kwan asked, his brain on the automatic 'ask questions when things are unclear' mode he had been stuck on for the past two days. He was immediately bathed in the glow of twenty-one ghostly eyes on his person and the woman finally let go as she stumbled backwards. He stood alone now, no ghost weapons anywhere near him. And the damn printer still wasn't done.

The skeleton stepped closer. Twin blue flames burnt in the otherwise empty sockets and the red toga looked tattered. Kwan noticed that the skeleton carried a triangle-shaped sheath at his side, secured to his hipbone with a leather belt.

"Your body is impure," the skeleton said. Kwan didn't know where the sound came from, but the jaw moved as if the skeleton still had a larynx. "Your soul, your ghost, is the one true freedom and value. We're the Ghost Liberation Front. We're here to free you from your prisons. Ascend with us, human, and become immortal."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If by any chance you're in the west part of the Netherlands (roughly between Rotterdam and Amsterdam), you should definitely try a kapsalon. Next chapter: explosions!


	9. Temporal Difficulties

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Kwan cried out and frantically waved his arms, taking a step backwards. "I only asked what exactly I volunteered for, not that I _wanted_ to volunteer. I mean, not everybody becomes a ghost," Kwan said, mind straining to remember everything he ever learned about ectoplasm and ghosts lest he become shish-kebab. The concealed weapon the skeleton carried looked dangerous. "If I volunteer, and that's a very big _if_ , by the way, there's no guarantee I'll even turn into a ghost."

Keeping them talking, stalling, still stalling, that was the only thing Kwan could come up with at the moment. Danny had to have transformed by now. Maybe he hung around invisibly, getting ready to take on yellow-eye and scatter their ranks.

"Oh human, there are so many ways to turn into a ghost," the skeleton said and did a horrible thing where he laughed by clacking the bones of his jaw together. "The GLF can guide you along the path. We can make you so much more than merely revolting flesh and _life_."

"Why do you hate live humans? You're alive as well," Kwan blurted out and promptly wished he hadn't. The blue flames inside the skeleton’s eyes burnt a sickly orange for a few seconds and a hiss of disgust passed all around him as the ghosts reacted to Kwan's statement. Any moment now he expected to see the handle of the concealed weapon protruding from his body, but the skeleton held back. A shiver nonetheless passed over Kwan's body as he realized he could very well talk himself into death with this bunch of ghosts around.

"You... say that with such... conviction," the skeleton slowly said. "Explain yourself."

Getting put on the spot wasn't a good position for Kwan to be in. He had been trained to deal with all kinds of situations, but he preferred to be a background character to many situations. Thinking on the feet was best left to Danny. But now Kwan's life truly hung in the balance for the first time in his existence when he was able to do something about it. Technus' attack had been too overwhelming to even begin an assault against and whenever Danny flew Kwan somewhere he trusted the half-ghost not to crash.

Kwan squared his shoulders and lifted his chin up, staring straight at the blue flames. "Ectoplasm itself is alive. It feeds, it procreates, it can contain itself, it adapts. Your, ah, _souls_ may be... deceased, but the stuff you're made of is alive. So if you hate live humans or anything living, _ipso facto_ , you hate yourself."

Never before in his life did Kwan wish so hard for a pair of sunglasses he could don. He knew his little speech wouldn't convince the ghosts to give up their obsessions since being a ghost was all about obsession. Still, he could stall some more, if he didn't get outright murdered for his probably wrong usage of Latin and his theory on living ectoplasm. But it still felt damn good to stand up to these bullies. He spotted some ghosts looking uncertain and resisted the urge to smirk. The courtroom soaps Dash made him watch came in handy sometimes.

Skeleton ghost just looked pissed off, along with yellow-eye. The commander hovered closer to the pair, his voice a tad louder in volume to intimidate.

"Like the human said, you won't have to _die_ to become a ghost and join our ranks! You only shed your filthy body and grasp your beautiful soul, you'll become so much more powerful, smarter, stronger. You no longer have to obey the laws of physics."

'He's good,' Kwan’s mental voice said, giving two thumbs up.

Kwan felt his stomach grow cold at this reply. Yellow-eye could twist arguments against his beliefs to his advantage within seconds. Maybe he'd been a cult leader or a twisted psychologist in his previous life.

"Do you have an explanation for _that_?" Yellow-eye asked in a challenging tone. His eyes glowed brighter and Kwan felt his life expectancy shorten even more. "Living things stay ground-bound, gravity always pulls at your bones."

The skeleton opened his jaw to say something but yellow-eye waved a hand. "Not yours, Servius."

'Gravity is the weakest force,' his mind came up with as a response, but his self-preservation instinct kept him from immediately voicing it. By now it was clear that Danny had gotten tangled up in something else, maybe he even got sucked into that giant thermos-like thing and hadn't managed to escape. Kwan hoped that new ghost fighters had risen, otherwise the fifteen humans inside the circles would soon become fifteen ghosts.

'Floating is hardly impressive, anti-gravs were around a hundred years ago,' his internal voice supplied.

"Defying gravity isn't that impressive," Kwan said out loud. "Birds do it as well, and anti-gravs exist."

" _Commandant_ , are we going to continue debating with this _imbécile_ , or are we going to look for a volunteer?" one of the ghosts interrupted. The female ghost had an accent and sported a ridiculously huge nose, along with clothes belonging to a ballroom of Versailles during the 18th century .

"Madame Deuxcheveau is right, our time is better spent on another volunteer and tracking Phantom," Servius summarized. He rejoined the circle up in the air but the tightness in Kwan's chest stayed. He feared he'd left the frying pan.

"Are any other humans willing to take control of their own fate, become more than merely-"

"I'm terribly sorry to interrupt, _capitaine_ , but I smell Phantom nearby," Madame Deuxcheveau said. Her nostrils flared and she inhaled air as if she was about to swim underwater for the next five minutes.

The terrified humans in the circle perked up and strained to spot the ghost. But no matter how hard Kwan looked, he couldn't find his friend.

'So now I'm your friend,' Kwan's mental voice commented. Something was wrong with that thought, but Kwan found it hard to focus on the why.

"Ghosts, stand ready. Remember, he could look like a child or like an adult, but his face always shows Phantom at some time in his life," yellow-eyes warned. Shields were raised and blasts were readied, but still there was no sign of Danny. The lobby stayed silent for ten, twenty seconds. Madame Deuxcheveau flew around, sniffing the air much like a manic terrier. She wavered between tracking the apparent scent down by the huddle of humans and on the right upper wall of the bank, unsure where Phantom was supposed to be. The other ghosts were tense but looked ready to attack and Kwan wished for the first time that Danny _didn't_ show up.

Of course, that was when he soared through the right wall.

* * *

The ghosts were fast to react, but Danny still had the element of surprise, even if Madame Deuxcheveau had accurately predicted his entry point.

The circle of ghosts blasted at the point where Danny had been a second ago while raising their shields. Servius hurled his shield again but this time it shattered a window behind Danny, who had gone intangible.

An elated grin graced his features and in his arms he held glass jars filled to the brim with dirt. He zipped around the circle once before sailing above them, his back scraping the ceiling and his ghostly tail trailing behind him. At the center of the circle he released the many jars cradled in his arms and Kwan saw the labels of the jars flash as they tumbled through the air. The glass contained herbs and salt.

The moment Danny's hands were free he pointed one palm at the circle of humans and aimed an array of blasts at the jars with his other hand. Several things happened at once. A green ghost shield erupted over the humans, barely big enough to cover them. A second later the first of the blasts pierced a jar and powdered herbs shot out as the glass shattered under the ectoplasmic energy. Three more jars shattered and one of the ghosts managed a return blast, tinted an ominous purple. It hit Danny in his side and he got smacked against the ceiling, plaster showering down around him. But he didn't stop firing.

'Ignite, damn you!' the voice screamed and Kwan felt the muscles in his left arm pull as if it was spasming. Involuntarily he half-raised his hand when whatever Danny aimed for happened.

There was a big enough cloud of herbs and salts in the air to ignite.

Kwan ducked instinctively as the insides of the bank lit up in yellow as the herbs exploded. The humans around him didn't have enough time to scream, they just hit the floor as the fireball roared towards them, the heat far outstripping the heat outside. The ghost shield was the only thing protecting them from the worst of it, but the ghosts screamed in pain. The shockwave roared against the green shield but all Kwan heard was a sound as if someone fell in a pile of cushions, a dull whomp. The whomp briefly drowned out the echoing wails but they went on long after the fireball disappeared, leaving only small fires to light the blackened walls, ceiling and floor.

In the aftermath of the explosion Kwan could only gape at the multitude of ghosts writhing in pain in mid-air. Some of them descended to the soot-covered floor where they created twisted snow angels. The green ghost shield dissipated and some humans used the opportunity to make a break for the exit, shrinking the group of fifteen to eight. Others, like Kwan, were too dumbstruck or in shock, unable to beeline to relative safety.

The woman who had held on to Kwan's arm so hard was one of the ones left behind. She screamed in belated mortal terror and sought out a new squeeze toy, thankfully. Kwan searched the ceiling for Danny, but the half-ghost wasn't in view. The sprinkler system finally detected that there was a fire and with a pitiful whoop the fire alarm activated simultaneous with the sprinklers, drenching humans and ghosts alike. Kwan twisted his head away from the water when drops fell into his eyes and he focused on the ghosts lying on the ground instead. Maybe he could do something about them, capture them somehow with the hopefully not too broken thermos system.

Before he could get two feet something seized up in his brain and he couldn't move anymore. His head swiveled upwards against his wishes and he automatically focused on the blurred figure of Phantom hanging near the ceiling. The big white hair was plastered against his head, making him look remarkably small. The sight of ectoplasm dripping from his hurt hand didn't add any confidence either. Until Kwan noticed his eyes.

If Danny had ever turned such eyes on Dash, the bullying would have been over in seconds, never to be picked up again. Kwan was reminded that Danny had been fighting undead beings for more than half his life, and a small circle of cultist ghosts were no match for the unbridled protecting fury which always surrounded the half-ghost.

'Hell yeah,' the voice in his head cried. Kwan had a suspicion what was going on and it got confirmed when his hand got lifted by the voice and a clear ghost ray burst out, targeting the momentarily dazed yellow-eye. An icy-blue blast hit the commanding ghost at the same time, stemming from Phantom. The water helped freeze the ghost and the ice spread out, jumping from ghost to ghost.

There were, however, ghosts still floating in the air. The original twenty-one had dwindled down to fourteen. Some of them nursed injuries from either the fireball or the herbs, but they could still fight. Two more had gotten caught by Danny's ice blast, but the others hid behind their shields. Kwan had seen Phantom use ice before to take down enemies, but this time the blast bounced off the shield.

'That's not possible,' Danny said inside Kwan's head, and Phantom again tried to take them down through frozen water, but once more the blast didn't get past the shield.

_They knew you were here, Danny, maybe they've prepared themselves_ , Kwan suggested. _Hell, they're here_ especially _for you._

'That makes me feel so special,' Danny said at a flat tone.

"Regroup!" Servius called. He had picked up a new shield from a fallen ghost and had used it to ward off the blasts. With yellow-eye momentarily incapacitated he assumed control and the ghosts listened to him. "Target him, fire!"

Phantom scrambled to get out of the way of the blasts in time. He didn't quite manage and erected a small ghost shield around himself to ward off the blasts. They ricocheted into the walls and ceiling, blackening them even more. The azure ceiling had by now completely given way to black and Kwan could no longer see what the mosaic on the floor was supposed to be.

"Acmon, left! Pugdala, right!"

Two ghosts broke from the circle and stretched their hands out. The left one was dressed in garish colors as if it stumbled through a wardrobe with glue on his body and he had a magnificent white beard which stood at odds against his blue skin.

'Like a Smurf,' shot through his (Danny's?) head.

The one on the right only had a vaguely humanoid shape. It had four arms and three legs and its skin wavered between yellow and orange, depending on the angle. Scales covered its back and the head was situated on the torso, going by the narrow slits posing as eyes.

Phantom dodged the first blast of air Acmon hurled at him, but the amount of dark matter Pugdala threw at him was too large to dodge. It hit his left leg and Phantom screamed as the darkness curled around his leg and began to dissolve his hazmat suit. Or, it tried to, since Phantom's suit being a hazmat suit meant it offered enough protection against acids. Phantom twisted his legs into his ghostly tail as he dodged another air blast and the dark matter fell off.

'Sorry Kwan, I need backup,' Danny said. Before Kwan could ask what he meant by that both Kwan's arms lifted up and powerful ghost rays emerged, hitting Pugdala and Acmon in the back. They dropped to the floor next to their injured kin.

Servius finally seemed to notice that the ghost rays came from two places at once and he took action. Kwan felt his mind being gripped by the powerful force of Danny and his muscles flung his body sideways without the signals traveling to his brain to ask for permission. He landed awkwardly on his side and rolled out of the way of more blasts Servius sent his way.

'You're too big,' Danny complained inside his head. Kwan was too busy figuring out the next move of the ghosts to talk back. 'Not athletic enough, you're all muscle and not ... stringy.'

Servius charged Kwan and two more ghosts followed his example, prompting Phantom to hit them with snowballs littered with ghost rays. That sent them sailing on a trajectory which ended against the wall but the snowballs had been too weak to do any lasting damage. Kwan felt light-headed, the same sensation he recognized as belonging to flight. Danny lifted them up from the floor, into the air, and more ghost rays escaped his fingers. If flying felt light-headed, ghost rays were streaks of boiling fury. It made his fingers tingle and for a moment Kwan remembered the injustice of a bad referee call.

He wished he could shake his head to clear his thoughts and chase the foreign feelings from his system, but Danny still had power over his movements. Kwan's body shot through the air, heading for the disrupted row of 3d-printers. The explosion had blackened the perspex cube as well but the printers looked unharmed, safe from the fight raging above them and the water coming from the sprinklers. Apart from the printer that got squashed by a shield, of course. Through patches of clear perspex Kwan spotted their printer. The heads had retracted back into the machine and standing gleaming in the small rays of daylight breaking through smoke and debris stood the transformer. It looked ready to be put to good use.

Danny maneuvered Kwan's body through the perspex via intangibility and his hands stretched out to grab the long-sought after item. They wouldn't be able to print a new one, Kwan knew, so this one simply _had_ to work. Before he could grab the transformer Danny's attention got yanked back to the fight.

Servius had once more regrouped and now pelted Phantom with everything his motley group could throw at the half-ghost. The ghosts had various abilities and that translated into one giant mess of blasts, air, acid, pink goo and Kwan even saw one ghost throw shoes. And Phantom couldn't dodge all of them, despite the various methods to his disposal. He separated his upper and lower half, went intangible and turned part of his body into mist, but he still ended up with pink goo in his hair and acid trying its hardest to eat through his glove. He did duck a shoe.

_You used to be better at dodging_ , Kwan observed impartially. Now that he was no longer in control of his body, he felt his mind actually relax. Danny had been in plenty of scrapes and he still (sort of) lived, he could handle this as well. Kwan couldn't do anything about it anyway.

'Usually I haven't duplicated myself and poured three quarters of my power into your body,' came the terse reply. 'I hope I can still do this-'

Kwan felt Danny shift inside his head as more power poured into the duplicate. Phantom inhaled and turned to the attackers, head lowered and fists at his side. He bent forward as he sent a Ghostly Wail towards the ghosts. Before the Wail hit them they hid behind their shields. For some reason the Wail didn't push them that far back, not enough to incapacitate them.

_I guess that's why the shields are so layered, to stop your Wail. They really came here prepared with the intention of beating you, Danny_ , Kwan said, but there came no reply.

Phantom dodged another barrage coming from the ghosts before he could counter-attack. A belated shoe clattered to the floor below Phantom. The half-ghost inhaled deeply, but instead of his Ghostly Wail there came shorter bursts of a sonic attack, aimed directly at the ghosts instead of in their general direction. With the ghosts distracted dodging and shielding themselves from this attack Danny used the opportunity to hit the ghosts once more with rays from below. He stuck intangible hands outside the perspex cube and hit the ghosts. The pink goo-throwing ghost tried to shield herself both from the concentrated Ghostly Wail and the ray and got hit by both instead. The Wail sent her towards the wall but the ray propelled her upwards, so she turned intangible and disappeared through the ceiling.

'I call it my Wailing Pulse,' Danny commented. 'But it's hard to do, so right now there's not much power in your body.'

_Can't we just grab the transformer and go_? Kwan asked. _Or can't_ I _grab the transformer and leave? That way you don't have to duplicate your body anymore._

'As long as the humans are in danger, we can't leave. I don't see any ghost fighters yet either, so we have to keep them busy, or they might end up hurting people,' Danny said not unexpectedly, with his annoying hero complex.

_If you leave, the ghosts might follow. They want you, after all, not these humans._

'They want to use them to keep me here,' Danny reasoned. 'If I leave, they'll start hurting them. They're not above that.'

Kwan tried to think of a way to convince Danny to stop overshadowing him and leave with the transformer so the half-ghost could go all-out without endangering Kwan's life, but all of those inside got distracted by a pinprick of green light coming from left of the teller windows. The eye was automatically drawn towards the pinprick as it grew larger and colors seemed to warp next to the pinprick, as if a wet vacuum was set loose behind a recently painted oil painting. The familiar green swirl of the Ghost Zone began to shine through as the hole in reality quickly grew.

'Oh, this is not good, I think,' Danny commented. He sounded uncertain but was kept transfixed. A chilled breath escaped both Kwan's and Phantom's lips. A hand appeared behind the hole. Kwan caught a glimpse of white gloves and a black suit before Danny forced Kwan to look away. In two steps he stood in front of the 3d-printer and he grabbed the transformer, tucking it under one arm. Phantom used the distraction to invisibly lower himself and rejoin his duplicate, or Danny rejoined Phantom, Kwan wasn't sure, he only knew that Danny was once again one person, situated inside his mind.

His body went into a full-body shiver when Danny dove out of Kwan's body. Danny's eyes shone unnaturally bright as he turned around, eyeing the being stepping forth from the portal. Before Kwan could focus on the ghost Danny positioned himself behind Kwan, grabbed his arms and lifted him up, heading towards the nearest wall.

"Keep hold of that transformer," Danny hissed as he turned them intangible and fled the scene.

"What the hell?!" Kwan yelled towards his airlift. The transformer was secure in his arms as the buildings flashed beneath them. Danny was fast, Kwan knew, but this was the first time he truly felt that speed. Nevertheless his voice had been loud enough to penetrate the sound of wind.

"Clockwork's gonna have my ass if I'm ever found in the presence of a future me," Danny yelled back. The opera house shot underneath them and they now flew over open water, invisibility be damned. They were going too fast to be identified anyhow. Danny angled for the avenue where they had exited the ghost zone but overshot, so they came to a jerky stop inside a park which stretched out underneath bridge pillars. The noise coming from the cars heading up the bridge was unpleasant so the park was only occupied by people walking dogs and the occasional jogger. Danny let his ghost form go, hidden in the branches of an overgrown tree. He slid down the trunk and landed next to Kwan, who still clutched the transformer in a white-knuckled grip.

Kwan didn't waste any time with the first question. His body felt warm, hot even, now that the chill of half-death had left him. But that didn't make him feel any less stressed. His heart had had the exercise of its life in the last ten minutes and if he closed his eyes he still saw the fireball racing towards him.

"Who the hell is Clockwork?" he yelled. "And why did you, we, just leave like that? First you were all 'we have to save these people' and the next second you say 'nope' and run like, like, the Box Ghost! And all this because of this guy Clockwork. So. Who is he?"

"Kwan, calm down-" Danny tried, but Kwan interrupted him.

"And why did you overshadow me anyway? I never gave you permission, you just invaded my body to be used as your puppet. You nearly got me killed!"

"I was trying to keep you safe!" Danny replied in an even tone, but to Kwan it just sounded like an excuse. "Remember how I told you about a ghost who controls time? Clockwork is the name of that ghost. And if he gives a warning, you listen to it. He told me to never, ever be in the same room as any future or past version of me."

Ghostly green was back in those blue eyes but this time Kwan wasn't intimidated. It only reminded him of the strange powers this man in front of him possessed, including the power to take over his body. What gave him the right to do that?

"So yeah, I ran," Danny said as he narrowed his eyes. "And I very much want to go back and check to see if everybody is alright and beat that damn yellow-eyed ghost and Servius and god knows what else those ghosts are called, but I can't. Maybe when I was young I would've, but I've seen Clockwork in action. There are some forces of nature you don't argue against."

"But you're-" Kwan began. Danny was suddenly three steps closer and standing on the tips of his toes to minimize the height difference a little. His big hair was back, dried by the whipping wind, adding those extra inches he sorely lacked.

"If your next words were going to be 'Phantom'..." He trailed off. He drew back and took a deep breath. "Listen, Kwan. I had to do _something_ to battle the GLF. I'm sorry that I overshadowed you, but I had to incapacitate some of them if I wanted any chance to win."

"You didn't win," Kwan growled. "They're still out there, with future you fighting them." Kwan put the transformer down as it was getting heavy and he used his freed arms to gesture in the direction of the 3d-bank. "You could've at least stayed around and made sure the other people got out before you bailed. Isn't that what you usually do?"

"This isn't exactly an usual situation. Future me is more than capable of dealing with those ghosts, alright? I can't do any more damage to the timeline than I've already done. I could actually be _erased_ from existence if that happens. And that'll leave Amity Park utterly defenseless. Wanna know what life is like having the town torched by every passing ghost, Kwan? Then make me go back inside that bank and you can find out first-hand!"

Kwan wanted to snap something back, but he recognized the situation. During training they'd dealt with anger management, and this was a classic example of an argument gone wrong. Danny had too much of a temper to deal with this constructively, so it was up to Kwan to defuse the situation.

"Alright, this isn't working," Kwan said. "We'll meet back here in twenty minutes and talk about this like adults." Danny opened his mouth to retort, but Kwan cut him off. "Like professional astronauts, Danny. Remember the anger management training. Twenty minutes."

Danny was clearly unhappy with the situation. His anger made him a good fighter, Kwan had seen that. But right now that anger stood in the way of a good, clean fight. Kwan also wanted to yell at the half-ghost about his tendency to overshadow people willy-nilly, but he knew he could wait. Danny on the other hand still sported the narrow green eyes, the tense shoulders and he took two steps after Kwan as he turned around and walked away.

"Danny, go fly somewhere, clear your head," Kwan said. "We'll meet here soon, like I said."

For some reason Danny flinched but finally looked like he wasn't ready to start the first ghost-human war. Half-ghost-human war, Kwan amended in his mind. Danny scrambled back up the tree and two seconds later a thin shadow flitted across the grass and disappeared.

* * *

Twenty-three minutes later they met up next to a pillar of the bridge. Kwan sat slumped against it and Danny joined him at a reasonable distance, had they been strangers.

"All of them survived," Danny began the first salvo of the second argument. Wait, Kwan corrected himself, Danny didn't sound angry anymore. Not happy either, but neutral.

"I thought you weren't supposed to go back there," Kwan said, attempting to use the same neutral tone Danny had used.

"I only did a fly-by. Clockwork warned me I should never be in the same room with future me, he didn't say anything about the same city. The police were there and I saw all eight people outside, so they're okay. No sign of ghosts, though."

"I'm glad to hear it," Kwan said. In the past twenty-three minutes he'd gradually calmed down from the adrenalin high and now just wanted to go home as soon as possible. In those minutes he'd checked the transformer for any damage. It looked fine on the outside, no dings or rattling sounds. Which meant that they were one step closer to home. But his only source of transport and protection was a high-strung, half-dead geek who couldn't even-

"Waffle?" Danny asked, holding out a perfect golden-brown square piece of baked dough. Powdered sugar covered the square and parts of Danny's fingers. Kwan accepted it and noticed it was still warm. With some flourish Danny next produced strawberries from a bulging pocket in his jumpsuit. Silently Kwan let Danny spread the fruit over his waffle before devouring it. He hadn't realized how hungry he'd gotten over the course of these past few hours, but finally he noticed the toll this day had taken on his body. Walking around half of Sydney and getting into a life-or-death fight sure awoke his appetite.

Danny scooted a bit closer while eating his own waffle, making it look like they were friends enjoying some peace and a snack to the casual bystander. When they'd both finished they sat in silence for a while. Kwan thought of a hundred ways to start the inevitable conversation, but every time he let the moment whoosh by, content to stare at the water and listen to the sounds of the futuristic cars crossing the bridge overhead.

"Alright, let's do this," Kwan began after he'd thought of what he wanted to say. He turned towards Danny. "Thank you for rescuing me from that situation. I know you did the best you could under the circumstances and in the end everybody's safe. I understand that this Clockwork ghost gave you specific instructions and if _you_ obey those, that ghost has to be incredibly powerful." Danny opened his mouth to say something, but Kwan wasn't done yet. "What I didn't like was the way you sneakily took control of my body. You were inside my head for far longer than I even noticed. I get that you thought it was the best way to keep me safe, but you should've at least announced yourself. Maybe then I could sympathize, but right now I'm just angry that you did it without consent."

Danny looked away as he answered. He clearly remembered the anger management training they'd both been through, because he started off with a compliment. "I appreciate the incredible calmth and ... professionalism you've been displaying the past two days, Kwan. I doubt any other person would've rolled with these circumstances like you have." Next he moved on to put the thoughts and especially the feelings inside his head into words. "I feel angry at you for making me feel like I had the ultimate responsibility inside that bank. Like you said, I did the best I could under the circumstances, but... I can always do more."

"If you say 'with great power' I'm leaving to get another waffle until you have purged all of the geek references from your system," Kwan warned with a bit of humor in his tone. Thankfully Danny chuckled and met Kwan's gaze. He departed from the constructive argument script with his next sentence. Danny should have addressed Kwan's major objection to the overshadowing part, but instead he sighed and let his head fall back against the pillar.

"I guess I'm not really angry at you, I'm angry at the situation. Clockwork's warning felt like an excuse to flee the scene to save my, our hides." His head jerked up as he said his next bit. "I _am_ sorry I overshadowed you without announcing myself or even asking first." And finally Kwan got the explanation he had been waiting for why Danny chose that route in the first place. "I had to duplicate myself to get the herbs and keep an eye on the ghosts inside the bank, and you were the logical choice. I could use all of my powers without the, ah, subject going through that cold-withdrawal thing first. And that way I was undetectable to scanners and ghosts with a similar 'warning system' like mine."

"Except for scent, apparently," Kwan said, remembering Madame Deuxcheveau with her big nose. Danny wrinkled his own nose as he smelt the air, mimicking the French mademoiselle.

"Yeah, I hadn't counted on that power. Good thing I had duplicated myself, or the dust explosion surprise would've failed."

That reminded Kwan of something. His eyes trailed down Danny's body until he noticed the bandages on Danny's right hand, the hand that he had sacrificed to keep the ghost shield steady. "How bad is it?" Kwan asked. Danny shrugged and held out his hand, palm up.

"I'll live."

By now Kwan knew that the half-ghost downplayed his injuries, so he tried to give him the look he had seen Sam give Danny to get him to spill. Sadly he lacked the spunk and spirit the Goth seemed to have in spades so he had to resort to words.

"How bad is it really, Danny?"

"Seven butterfly stitches but in the end it's just one more scar."

Danny withdrew the hand and it was Kwan's turn to let his head thump against the pillar. "I get why you chose to overshadow me, I do. But why not announce what your plan was? I could've helped you better, acted earlier, I don't know, distracted a ghost."

"I've had to hide for so long it's become second nature," Danny replied with a shrug. The matter-of-factness of that remark made Kwan realize that Danny was lonely. "I have never fought ghosts with you before and I had no way of knowing how you were going to react. I thought I'd get most of them with the dust explosion and thought that I wouldn't even have to use the duplicate inside your body. Until those ghosts showed a lot of power. You wouldn't have found out, and I could've kept you safe should a stray blast hit you somehow. Win-win."

"Except... it didn't really happen that way," Kwan said softly. Danny grinned back but the expression looked like somebody had taken a mandarin and painted it green, claiming it was an apple.

"It never does. By now I should be used to it, but hope springs eternal."

Kwan didn't know what to reply, so he stayed silent. The brainwave he'd just had regarding Danny's loneliness still spun merrily around inside his head, and this time there was no internal voice to distract him from it. Rationally he knew that Danny was two of a kind, but connecting that to the tired man with a five o'clock shadow took effort. Half his life he'd been an extreme outcast. He had a wife and friends, but at the same time was a, a... superhero. A dead one, but still. Phantom seemed so strong, so secure in his strength. No wonder nobody had linked the two of them together when Danny presented such different masks to the outside world.

"I forgive you," Kwan said. The look Danny gave him made Kwan wonder if he'd carried the same dumbfounded expression on his face when Danny had said those words two dimensions away. Then Danny gave a real smile.

"Thank you, Kwan."

"Hey, if you can forgive me for bullying you all those years, I sure as hell can forgive you for saving my life."

Danny laughed and got up. "If you put it that way." He extended his hand and pulled Kwan to his feet. "Shall we chase away the globs which by now have nestled inside our station? And then finish our engine and get ourselves back home?"

"Two brilliant ideas, Mr. Fenton," Kwan said. After a beat he added, "I'm glad we could talk about this. I know it sounds not very jock-like-"

"You're no longer a jock, Kwan, you're not even close to the bully I knew in high school. And I'm glad too. I really didn't want to talk in rhyme again," Danny said cryptically before lifting Kwan into the air, heading for Holbrook Avenue.


	10. Chapter 10

Kwan watched impassively as another chunk of their island drifted off into the invisible currents of the Ghost Zone. A grinning Danny Phantom appeared from down below, floating through the island until he would no longer die if he suddenly lost control of his intangibility, merging his organs with rock. Or something else nasty happened, like a nuclear explosion since atoms were split all of a sudden. Kwan didn't like to think about that.

"That's the last of it," Danny announced. "The engine is ready, I've carved up half the island to make it lighter, we've got enough ectoplasm to power it for four days... I'd say we're ready to go!"

Kwan looked behind him at the mess of cables leading from the station to the two propellers propped on their metal struts, balancing on the edge of the island. The transformer they'd secured with so much trouble wasn't even visible from this vantage point, hidden away near the ecto-converter situated inside the space station. They'd welded the tankards to a contraption in order for them to tip over every fifteen minutes to deposit some ectoplasm in the appropriate funnel of the ecto-converter. It was an engine alright, if you looked at it from afar and had no technical knowledge whatsoever. But Kwan knew it'd get them home anyhow.

"We just have one more problem," said Kwan. Danny hovered a bit lower, his thick eyebrows announcing the quizzical look on his face. "We don't know which direction to go in," finished Kwan.

Danny shrugged and pointed at the giant swirling mass of ectoplasm in the distance. "I know we need to stay away from there, but as for the rest... Pick a direction, any direction, and we'll just have to try and ask a ghost along the way."

Kwan turned around in a complete circle before he pointed at some green fog obscuring part of the scenery. "That way," he said.

"Sure, why not. Gentlemen... start. Your. Engines! Or the propellers, but that doesn't sound as good, does it?" Danny's grin was sincere and happy and Kwan couldn't help but grin back as he headed back inside the turn the whole thing on. This only took the push of a button, so he was back outside in twenty seconds. The propellers made a strange noise as they powered up and it took Kwan some seconds to realize what was so alien about the noise they generated. It was the sound of wind, inside the windless Ghost Zone. It seemed out of place.

A small tremor shook through the island but then it actually began to move, slowly. It picked up speed as the tankards tipped over for the first time, depositing the necessary ectoplasm in the ecto-converter.

Danny whooped and circled the island three times, zipping around easily, his exhaustion and wounds from the fight inside the bank already halfway to healed. It had taken them five hours to assemble the entire rig and Kwan had used a break to change clothes and have another sponge bath, which put him in better spirits too. And the fact that they had actually done it added happiness to his emotions as well.

_Watch out NASA, here come the Ghostzonenauts._

* * *

"To the left! Left!"

"I'm pushing already!"

Too slow their island drifted to the left, but the majority of it still headed for an impact with another floating island. That was the trouble with an engine that could only go forward: the steering had to be done manually by pushing the island left or right. Danny had insisted that he had enough power to do that, but the imminent collision told the truth.

"LEFT!" yelled Kwan in vain, bracing for impact. With an almighty grunt Danny gave the island one last shove and turned intangible before he got crushed between the two masses of rock. With an almighty crunch the islands collided, but the last shove had had enough power behind it to only scrape the island, instead of crashing head-on. The whole island trembled as the shock wave traveled through and Kwan fell to his knees, hoping at the same time that their severely structurally... re-imagined island wouldn't crumble apart. But the tremors subsided and the island was still whole, so unless cracks appeared on the surface, they were okay. Hopefully.

Kwan cast around for Danny and found the half-ghost standing on the other island, his green eyes flitting left and right, also searching for any cracks on the surface. Both his arms trembled from the strain he had put upon them and sweat drops coated his brow. When he saw Kwan's look he gave a thumbs-up.

"Looks alright!" he called and positioned himself on the edge of their island again, pushing them apart. When they were back on course Danny sat down heavily on the grass at the edge, his legs dangling over the nothingness of the Ghost Zone. Kwan joined him there, offering a bottle of water. Danny emptied it within seconds and looked at his trembling hands.

"Now I know how the Titanic could've sunk. That island came out of nowhere!"

"At least half of it wasn't underwater, but yeah, we need a radar."

The whirl of propellers and the nearly imperceptible hum of the ecto-converter were the only sounds they heard for a while. Slowly the trembling in Danny's hands subsided. He brought his knees to his chest and rested his chin on them, eyes turned to the front of the island to make sure they wouldn't crash into another island or a ghost's lair again.

"At least that means we're making progress," said Kwan. Danny jumped a bit as if he suddenly remembered he wasn't alone on this island.

"Yeah, but I still don't recognize any of it. We could be going in completely the wrong direction."

Kwan shrugged. "We were originally 230 miles from Earth, a few miles in the wrong direction is no big deal. I wonder how fast we're moving anyway."

Danny gave him a sideways look Kwan recognized as his 'you've got a puzzle piece but don't know which puzzle it's from' look. It was a fairly specific look. "Distance doesn't quite work the way in the Ghost Zone as it does on Earth," he said. "The Ghost Zone itself is hard to navigate around in. There are some spots which are fixed, but the distance between them changes. Ghosts live off emotions, like you know. The Ghost Zone itself is … well, I'm not sure yet, but I think it's an emotional construct. The distance varies because of the emotions you feel when you're traveling through it. A human mind can shape the Ghost Zone in new ways, and it stays that way until another human passes through."

"So if we're in a hurry, we can tell the surroundings to shrink?" Kwan theorized. Danny shook his head, hampered by his own knees.

"No, I'm afraid not. You can't ask it nicely to change for you. It has to feel the emotion before it changes. I haven't worked out what emotions shape the distances. Mostly because I'm either angry, afraid or sad when I'm here. Ten years ago or so, when we were chasing Vlad through the Ghost Zone, we ended up near Jupiter within minutes."

"But you were angry at that time, I presume."

Danny nodded. "Yes, I was. But it still got us to that planet so fast... One time I was elated though, and traveling sure seemed to go a lot faster. Like when you go somewhere new, it seems like a really long time to get there. But when you drive back, you're back home in no time at all. I'm still not sure if that was what happened, or if the Ghost Zone had somehow shrunk a bit to help me."

"That'd be useful," thought Kwan out loud. "If we accidentally go in the wrong direction, it won't matter much since distance is relative. So we just have to be happy?"

"I doubt that fake happiness is going to cut it. We could try laughing a lot."

"It's worth a shot. Know any good jokes?"

* * *

The voices from the ghosts outside still traveled through the open door of the space station, although the words were muffled enough Kwan couldn't really understand what they were saying. Quite annoying, since Danny was attempting to get directions from them. And Kwan had no idea how good Danny was at remembering directions, since above all he was a guy, and they tended to never ask for directions. Kwan had a vision of Danny in his Phantom body being lost in Amity Park and just flying on until he spotted a familiar landmark. Because finding your way around town wasn't hard from ground level, but there were no helpful signs in mid-air. Kwan sometimes had trouble even identifying what country the station flew over, let alone navigate a fairly large city like Amity Park with pinpoint precision. He thought he'd once spotted Amity Park at night, but it had shifted from the viewing window too quickly to identify.

Kwan gingerly walked across the floor, heading for the Destiny lab. Three days had passed by now since the beginning of this whole situation and the experiments on board the station had most likely failed by now. They'd commandeered the ecto-convertor for their engine and the ectoplasm samples were contaminated by the Ghost Zone ectoplasm. Kwan had been trained to deal with the other experiments, but he hadn't yet taken the time to check up on them since they had landed in the Ghost Zone. Now that he had to hide inside the station until Danny was done visiting the nearby ghost lairs, he had some time (and an incentive to stay inside, since the presence of a human they could feed on would only serve as a distraction). If ghosts ever got organized they could start a battery farm with humans serving as emotional food. And then they could go on to enslave humankind and create a virtual reality world where the humans thought they lived, until one savior would turn up-

His rampant thoughts got interrupted when he arrived at the lab and saw the state of it. Green coated the walls, the ceiling and the floor. A drop slid down the ceiling, hovered in mid-air and then decided to slam into the right wall, where it rejoined its siblings.

"Well... The experiments are ruined," Kwan said out loud. The landing couldn't have been soft on the module, but the amount of ectoplasm covering the inside was extraordinary. It was as if somebody had set off some C4 inside a paint jar. But that wasn't the worst part. The ectoplasm crawled along the walls, blindly floating left and right and up and down, no doubt looking for an exit. Kwan suddenly itched all over as he watched the usually inert liquid coming alive and crawling around. He imagined it sliding along underneath his skin and absentmindedly scratched the back of his hand.

He had theorized that ectoplasm itself was alive, but seeing it in action was another thing. Something inside the Ghost Zone had to activate the ectoplasm somehow, because on Earth it was just a liquid with unusual characteristics, but at least it didn't flip across the room like a blind spider.

Kwan shook himself and tried to look at the sight in a different way. What experiments could he still salvage? He brushed aside a few drops and set to work.

Half an hour later a cold feeling wafted over his back and he readied the laptop he held in case it was an unfamiliar ghost creeping up on him. But it was only Danny, phasing through the wall. He opened his mouth to say something, took in the state of the laboratory and closed it again.

"I think our experiment is ruined," he finally said. Kwan placed the laptop on the salvageable pile before he answered.

"I think a lot of experiments are ruined. So far I've been able to save most of the electronics, but the jumping spider is a bust."

"Why's that?" Danny asked. He kept hovering above the floor, drifting further into the laboratory. For a moment Kwan imagined himself in outer space again, the weightlessness making sure he never knew what the ceiling and what the floor was. Now he doubted he would ever forget that.

"The cage burst and she has escaped."

"Pity, I liked Nefertiti. But I've got good news!" Danny jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "One of those ghosts outside knew which direction to take to get to Pandora's lair. She's a friendly ghost, and I know the way home from that spot!"

"Great! Let's fire up the engine and go!" said Kwan with a huge smile. "Did they also know how long it'd take us to get there? Roughly?"

Danny shrugged. "I didn't ask." At a look from Kwan he held his hands wide in a 'what are you going to do' gesture. "Sorry, he _bearly_ spoke English." Kwan waited a few seconds. Danny lowered his hands. "The ghost was a bear," he elaborated in a flat tone. "But he did help us get our _bearings!_ No? Well, that was embearassing." Kwan groaned and Danny grinned. "I'll fire up the engine, you go on with your grizzly task."

The half-ghost fled through the wall but before Kwan could resume his task Danny's intangible head popped back in. "Be back in a jiffy, _honey!_ "

"I'm so glad I'm not on Team Phantom!" Kwan yelled after him, for once in his life meaning it. He never quite understood how a dark girl like Samantha Manson could find a guy who used puns in everyday life attractive. Danny might be one of the strongest people in the world, at heart he would forever be a complete and utter dork.

* * *

The engine held up remarkably well for something so cobbled together from different time periods. They had two more near-crashes with islands but they had gotten better at spotting them and diverting course. They were into the twelfth hour from the moment they knew where they were going. Well, Danny knew where they were going, everything still looked the same to Kwan. But it felt like they were making progress.

"Can't you tear a hole between the dimensions to see how far from Earth we are?" Kwan asked. For once Danny was in human form as he ate. Kwan could guess why, because Danny had startled him more than once in the previous two hours. Which meant that the half-ghost hungered for human fear, and Kwan's mind immediately plastered that sentence onto the cover of a cheap horror movie. Preferably something with a close-up of an eye and green blood splotches.

Danny swallowed before he answered. He waved his fork around to emphasize words. "I could, but it wouldn't be much use. The Ghost Zone shifts around all the time. The doors move, everything moves. The moment you step out, so to speak, the Ghost Zone keeps on going. So even if you turn around and immediately create a new portal, the Ghost Zone has moved. One portal could lead to Neptune, and a portal one yard to the left to the barn of a Russian farm."

Kwan chewed on his piece of broccoli for a while before he replied. "So the Ghost Zone is revolving around something?"

"I don't know yet," Danny answered truthfully and with a frown on his face. "So far nobody's been able to figure out what exactly the Ghost Zone _is_. Tuck thinks it's a nexus."

When Kwan gave him a blank look and stopped his broccoli halfway to his mouth Danny elaborated. "You never read many superhero comics, did you? Never mind," he waved the fork in a dismissive gesture, "you were on the A-list. A nexus is a world between worlds, a hub connecting all kinds of dimensions."

"So why is it moving around?"

Danny ran a hand through his hair in frustration, making it appear even bigger. "I don't _know_ , Kwan. I just know that full ghosts can see leylines, and they shift around." The fork slashed left and right, showing an imaginary web of lines in mid-air. "My parents haven't been able to think of an invention to show them to us, so in the meantime it's trial and error about placing a portal. Hence the Infini-map's worth..."

The half-ghost shot up so fast the tray on his lap toppled over and the contents coated the purple grass. Kwan hoped that Danny wouldn't startle him so much again when he inevitably became hungry.

"Forget Pandora, we can go to Frostbite!" Danny exclaimed, turning to Kwan, his eyebrows doing a weird squiggly dance as if he'd just presented the solution to world peace. Kwan grew tired of looking quizzically at Danny these past days as they roamed unfamiliar terrain. It wasn't fair how much Danny knew about the Ghost Zone and how many times Kwan had to ask for elaboration. When all this was over Kwan planned on taking Danny to a football game and letting him ask all the questions for once.

"Who's Frostbite?" Kwan asked in an almost bored sounding tone. Danny should by now know not to throw names like that around. Enthusiastically Danny spun a tale about yeti creatures living in the Ghost Zone, possessing both advanced technology and remarkable powers but little in the way of entertainment.

"They taught me how to control my ice powers. Without them, well... I'd have died, probably," Danny finished his tale. His arms snaked around his forearms as if he was warming himself up. When he realized what his hands were doing he dropped them and sat back down. The prepackaged meal had gone to waste. Kwan realized that they should probably do an inventory of the remaining food. Their mission had been nearing its end after all, and right now they should have been training the new crew before heading back down to Earth. The new crew would have brought fresh food and other supplies. The ISS was kept well-stocked in case of an emergency, but if the Ghost Zone expanded around them or did some other impossible juggling with physics they would have to find a new food source.

"Land ho!" Danny suddenly yelled and blinded Kwan by transforming. He jumped over the edge and once more steered the island away from another collision. Kwan ran over to the station in case he had to cut power to the propellers, but Danny didn't give that signal yet. A few moments later their course changed and they gently drifted past the island. Danny clawed back onto their island and dropped heavily to the ground. Quite a feat for a being who could float without even noticing it, so that probably meant something was up.

As Kwan walked up to Danny a bright blue blast slammed into the ground inches from his left foot. He swung his body around to see who or what was gunning for him.

The ghost looked positively emaciated. His spectral form was transparent in places and the white glow ghost zone beings gave off was nearly invisible against the diffused light of this dimension. The ghost looked like he had died during the height of the disco rage but the platform shoes were no longer humorous once they were made from ectoplasm, Kwan decided.

"Human," it groaned, stretching out its arms towards the real world person. Kwan hastily took a few steps back as it readied another blast. He doubted that the blasts were that powerful going by the state of the ghost, but he still didn't want to risk any injuries.

"Danny?" Kwan asked, but the syllables had barely left his lips before Phantom barreled into the disco ghost. He bodily tackled him and they disappeared past the edge of the island. Kwan hurried back to the station to look for a weapon, any weapon at all. Even a length of wire with something heavy at the end would do as long as he had Danny as backup.

Two blue blasts shot upwards into the endless nothing of the Ghost Zone before an enormous green flash briefly illuminated the island. Danny's white hair appeared over the edge, drifting over the ground, spectral tail brushing the purple grass. He reformed his legs and pretty much threw himself to the ground. Even from a distance Kwan could see that Danny was tired, maybe even exhausted. Kwan abandoned his search for something weapon worthy and instead picked up a new prepackaged meal before heading to Danny's side. Danny transformed back into a human and Kwan hoped that was voluntarily, because as the disco ghost just showed they were still a prime target for wandering ghosts.

"Eat up," Kwan commanded. Danny took a second too long to look up and reply.

"M'not hungry," he muttered. Kwan pushed the tray onto his lap.

"Yes, you are," Kwan countered. "You scared me on purpose not an hour ago, which means that you're hungry. So eat up, because next time my fist might not miss your face."

Something in Kwan's tone got through to Danny because the half-ghost peeled the plastic back from the tray and laboriously began to eat. His hands still trembled slightly from the recent strain of changing course yet again and Kwan got an inkling what the drain of Danny's energy was.

In a human body there was only so much energy to go around before the body began shutting down. Sure, it could take weeks to die of a lack of energy, or rather, food, but it happened all too often around the world. But Kwan wondered how long Danny could actually go without food when he was active as Phantom. He used extraordinary amounts of power but didn't eat that much more than the average astronaut. Whether that was out of necessity to preserve food or because he truly wasn't hungry, Kwan didn't know, but he did have a sudden vision of Phantom hanging in the air, as see-through as that disco ghost.

"Are you sure that ghost is gone?" Kwan asked. Danny nodded, chewing his mouthful thoroughly before replying.

"I blasted it away, it should take a few days for it to reform its body," Danny said. "It's a bit of a violent solution, but without my Thermos it's the only solution we've got."

He played a bit with the food before he took another bite, chewing slowly. Kwan didn't leave him until he had polished off the tray. Danny's hands had stopped shaking and he didn't look as exhausted anymore. He even got up and transformed, body floating in the air two seconds after he'd changed. Hovering had to be a subconscious thing, Kwan decided.

"I'm taking another look around, see if I can spot anything familiar. Yell if another ghost comes at you," Danny said before speeding off. Kwan collected the trays and deposited them inside a waste storage device.

The Ghost Zone scenery slid by, one door after another, with barely any change in the huge swirls of green and black. The ecto-converter kept plugging away, but it still didn't feel like they had actually moved. His mind drifted back to the conversation about relative distance and he forced himself to think happy thoughts. His fiancée would welcome him back like a hero once they had made their way home. He was going to get married after all this was over, and he would be able to spend his whole life with her, smelly feet and inability to pronounce 'particularly' and all. That thought succeeded in bringing a smile to his face as he tried to spot the white glow of Danny Phantom circling the island.

Once they got home, they could get underway with repairing the space station and putting it back into proper orbit, albeit hopefully with a stronger engine to get it through the Ghost Zone this time. Danny could get that Infini-Map he was talking about, and in the end it would all work out fine. They had made it this far, it wouldn't be long before they got back to the portal now, he was sure of it. Or so he told himself.

Danny's white glow drifted into view. He was a lot further out than Kwan had realized and immediately he looked around, trying to see if any ghosts had decided to attack the human for his ability to give off fear and feed the ghost for a long time to come. But there were only doors, and the shape of a rather large island bobbing up and down in the distance. The floating island bobbed up and down a lot more than usual, but as long as nothing showed up to bump them off-course the island would float right past it.

On top of the island sat a white manor, looking out of place in the color scheme of three the Ghost Zone sported. It gave off a general feeling of man-made instead of ghost-made. Did ghosts even build buildings?

The white manor was elongated, a yellow-golden roof slanting sharply upward with sash windows dotting the front, a few bay windows in strategic places. There was superfluous decoration all over the house, from the gable dormers with three-leaf clovers inlaid in the stone to the varying pattern of bricks lending the illusion of length to the rectangle house.

As their floating island dutifully moved closer to the manor Kwan noticed what felt off about it. It didn't give off a glow like ghosts did. The structure obeyed the laws of physics of the real world and it looked like somebody had pasted it on the horizon, carrying all the wrong angles and smells. The soft smells of dirt, grass, cat hair and brick combined with the chemical smells of fresh paint and cleaning solution wafted from it as if Kwan stood inside the lobby instead of at a distance. Most of all it was the smell that marked this building as one from the real world, somehow lost inside this dimension. Had it fallen through a rift? The style of the manor looked old but the stone carried the sheen of wet paint. Maybe the freshness of it had been preserved by the vacuum of the Ghost Zone, where only ectoplasmic bacteria roamed, and the manor was really from the Victorian era.

The islands drifted closer together and Danny made his way back to the station, a frown on his face.

"I'm not sure, but I've seen that manor before." Before Kwan could say something Danny took off towards it, only to smack face-first into a solid green bubble. A ghost shield, emanating from the tip of the archway leading to the front door of the manor. It covered the entire island. Once Danny peeled himself off the ghost shield it faded away. Definitely a real world house then.

The islands were now only three hundred feet apart and now Kwan saw that although the house was built in the style of the Victorian era, it most certainly was a modern house. A tarmac driveway got cut off at the edge of the island and the porch light was electric. The bug zapper half-hidden underneath a bay window sealed the deal. This house was modern.

A high-pitched sound, more felt than heard, pierced through the remaining distance and a black mobility scooter hummed into view. The white-haired creature appeared human, also lacking the supernatural glow of ectoplasmic entities, much like his house. He appeared unsurprised at the appearance of a space station on his doorstep.

The man just rolled his scooter closer and a leisurely smile made its way onto his face.

"Hello, Daniel."


	11. Chapter 11

He looked far less fearsome than Kwan remembered him. Age hadn't been kind to the notorious man who had once held the entire world hostage. He was still dressed in an expensive suit, but the colors were faded and threads hung from worn sleeves. His beard was no longer as well kempt as it could be and the word 'sleek' no longer applied to him. A lot of the fire and cleverness which drove the former major of Amity Park had gone the way of the Disasteroid, but his eyes remained those of a successful businessman, always searching for that one deal.   
  
The mobility scooter was new, though. His legs were small and didn't fit in with the rest of his body anymore. The scooter itself was pure black, an elegant design which could fit in with the future Sydney they had visited. The column supporting the handle bars was as thin as a toothbrush, wires spiraling around it before disappearing into the frame. Kwan spotted an ecto-converter sticking out in the back, not fully integrated in the frame of the scooter. But the ecto-converter powered it in this place with no electricity or even trees to build a fire in order to survive.   
  
Vlad Masters looked as human as Danny, but Kwan knew they stood on opposite sides of the fence. Hell, you could build a space elevator between the two and it still wouldn't be enough to visualize how high their views differed from each other. It was hard to believe that this man threatened the entire world. Well, the Disasteroid threatened it, but he was the one who took major advantage of his unique position. Any other man would have used his powers for good, or at least try to stop humanity's extinction. But it took a man of Masters' capability to earn money from it. If his plan had succeeded, he would have been a god to them.   
  
But fate twisted sideways and let the small possibility of the Disasteroid coated entirely with ectoranium slip through somehow. It was a rare mineral, and it took the science geeks years to find out how it could exist in the first place. It had something to do with rock entering and exiting the Ghost Zone, taking ectoplasm with them, solar particles subsequently bombarding the ectoplasmic residue until it turned into ectoranium. Or was it solar wind? Something to do with the sun, anyhow, Kwan knew.   
  
None of this science had helped Vlad Masters. He was now alone, crippled and shunned in the real world.   
  
"Vlad," Danny said in a low tone. His hands fisted at his sides, his shoulders all the way up to his ears. You could bounce a penny off his taut muscles. "I thought you were lurking near Pandora's palace."   
  
"And now I'm here. Funny, isn't it, how space bends inside this place? But I'm sure you're banking on that, since you're dragging the International Space Station through the Ghost Zone. You must have a very good reason, taking one of mankind's greatest achievements into this dimension. I hope it isn't going to be the victim of one of your rash decisions."   
  
Kwan could see why Danny hated this man so much. It wasn't just the way he effortlessly picked the one thing which would hurt Danny the most. It was his ability to talk as if he had rehearsed it a hundred times in the mirror. The pauses were perfect, the delivery of the lines flawless. No stutter, no umms and ahhs. Just flowing, hurtful speech.   
  
"We don't have time for your delusions, old man. Kwan, fill the converter with more ectoplasm. We're leaving," Danny said with finality to his tone. He kept his gaze locked onto Vlad.  
  
Vlad rolled his mobility scooter closer to the edge. The two islands still drifted in the Ghost Zone, heading in different directions, although they now hovered so close Kwan could get from one to the other if he took a running jump. Kwan hoped that Vlad's scooter couldn't hover, otherwise they would have a megalomaniac on their hands, chasing them through this dimension. It was a good thing Vlad didn't get to the space station when they were off through one of the doors. A ghost getting its hands on the ISS was bad enough, but Vlad would probably turn it into a weapon of mass destruction.   
  
"What's the hurry? I'm hardly a threat to you anymore, Daniel. Why don't you introduce me to your colleague?" Vlad asked, rolling along with them.   
  
Danny swooped lower, eyes glowing so bright. "I know about your deals with the Fright Knight, Plasmius. You're about as harmless as my Wailing Pulse. Which is one of my ghost powers. I thought I should remind you, since you barely have any powers anymore."   
  
Vlad's mask of civility slipped and Kwan saw the man the world had spit out appear. He was as broken as his crippled legs, barely masked by the thin fabric covering his diminished importance. He appeared smooth and strong, but Danny had either learned or been taught the art of hitting where it hurts, whether it was a ghost's weak spot or the metaphorical fist to the temple to knock the opponent out.   
  
Yet, despite the older man's disability, he still made deals and was able to keep himself alive in a hostile environment without the benefit of ghost powers. He could call himself hardly a threat, but Kwan knew that it was no coincidence that their islands scraped by each other with inches to spare.   
  
"This astronaut is not one of your little band of adventurers, is he? How much does he know?" Vlad asked. Danny looked briefly back at Kwan before snapping his attention back to the front, hovering a bit lower, one knee slightly bent at the knee.   
  
"He knows enough. Kwan, the converter?"   
  
Kwan was reluctant to go inside the station and leave Danny alone with this... villain. Judging by the brightness of Danny's eyes his temper was bucking and jumping like a rodeo horse, ready to be let out as soon as the gate opened. But Danny had fought this guy for more years than Kwan was happy with, so five more minutes alone with him wouldn't hurt. Probably.   
  
The ecto-converter's output was steady, but the beauty of it was that when more ectoplasm entered it, it would temporarily emit more power. If they did this too much it would burn out, but doing it once kept the dials in the green. Kwan hoped that the transformer would let the surge pass on to the propellers so they could get out of here as soon as possible. Vlad's scooter looked like it was land-bound, but the man had a surprise up his sleeve, no doubt about it.   
  
Kwan hoped that it wasn't one of the killing kind.   
  
XXX  
  
The windows inside the space station were sparse and small, calculated to keep as much heat in as possible. There was a small viewing port where an astronaut could look at the Earth in all its glory in 360 degree view. It was one of Kwan's favorite spots inside the cramped station.   
  
So when something once again hit the space station, Kwan had no idea what or who it was, although he would bet a thousand dollars it wasn't Technus. The nearest window was twenty-five feet away and showed nothing but the swirling green vista of the Ghost Zone. No sound penetrated the thick hull, no ghost, half-ghost or glob phased through the metal. After the first hit it remained quiet outside. Which led Kwan to run faster to the open airlock. His foot was inches away from hitting the purple grass when he was flung against the side. The metal screeched and Kwan heard things snap as the station got shoved sideways forcefully by an unseen force.   
  
Briefly Kwan visualized what would happen if the space station got tipped over the edge of the island with him still inside it. His mind arrived at the conclusion that the Ghost Zone would have one more ghost haunting the place.   
  
"Kwan!" Danny screamed. His voice was soft, as if far away, but Kwan heard the urgency behind it. A ghost powerful enough to move the space station was one to watch out for. Was it a ghost, though? Vlad was powerful, although even with all the technology in the world there was no way a mobility scooter possessed the horse power to pull or push the ISS so hard. Even if it was ecto-powered and invented by a man smart enough to fool an entire city for a year.   
  
Kwan peeled himself off the wall and rubbed his head where it had made its acquaintance with Mr. metal. Finally his feet met grass as he stepped forward, out of the death trap should it get shoved over the edge.   
  
Well, Vlad was not the one who had shoved the space station so hard. It was someone else, but at the moment the ghost was too much of a blur as he/she/it and Danny chased each other around. Vlad watched the fight impassively, slipping on the mask of polite boredom, like one wore attending an equestrian event when one preferred monster truck rallies. Despite the fight raging on above, below, beside them he appeared calm.   
  
Kwan chanced a glance backwards to check if the station was still whole. The module which had already stuck out over the edge  did so by a foot more, but the station got mostly shoved backwards instead of sideways. Another shove like that, though, and there wouldn't be much of a station left.   
  
Kwan's arrival hadn't gone unnoticed by Vlad. The old man and the astronaut looked each other in the eye. Kwan wished NASA allowed weaponry on board, even a mini blaster would be useful right now. But all he had was himself.  
  
Vlad activated something in his mobility scooter and it began to hover, like Kwan had feared. The advance of technology hadn't gone by Vlad unnoticed, despite that he was confined to this dimension. Maybe he could start over in a country where there wasn't much in the way of police, but even over there his face was bound to show up on some kind of record sooner or later. A man like Vlad Masters stood out wherever he went, thanks to his striking white hair, his intelligence and his tendency towards villainy.   
  
Kwan jumped out of the way as Vlad maneuvered his mobility scooter towards their island. Danny zipped by fairly close to the island, but otherwise the fight was still a blur to Kwan.   
  
"Well, who would've known. Kwan Lin, joining team Phantom." Vlad came to a stop too close for comfort.   
  
"Vlad Masters," Kwan said in return, not knowing what else to say. 'Leave us alone?'. He had no idea why Vlad remembered his name, or how come the ex-billionaire could even recognize him. "I haven't exactly joined team Phantom. We are busy surviving and getting home, I don't have time to think about what fictional team I'm on."   
  
"But you do know you're not on mine, right, boy?"   
  
As long as the man was talking, he didn't have the opportunity to steal the ISS from under their noses. But even with limited knowledge about his life Vlad was able to make Kwan mad by calling him 'boy.' Since he hit his growth spurt few people called him 'boy'. Kwan forced himself to keep on talking, distract the man until Danny defeated whatever foe he was fighting.  
  
"I'm on the get home team. And I don't think that it matters what 'team' you're on. The world hasn't seen your face since the Disasteroid incident. If you are as formidable as you like yourself to think, you would've shown up, not scurried away to the Ghost Zone and hid here in your miserable mansion for all those years."   
  
A flash of light and something punched Kwan in the shoulder hard enough that he fell backwards. Pain blossomed a second afterwards, and the wind got knocked out of him as he fell on his back. The smell of singeing cloth bombarded his senses, along with pain in his left shoulder. He gripped it with his right automatically and rolled on his side, gasping for air. After a few precious seconds he was able to draw in a small breath, but that only resulted in a coughing fit. Whenever he was briefly able to open his eyes he saw pink smoke waft upwards from his injured shoulder, but it faded after a few seconds and left a circular burn mark behind.   
  
So that was what it felt like to be hit with a ghost ray, the detached part of his mind observed. The adrenalin kicked in soon after that mental remark and the high whine of Vlad's scooter alerted him to danger.   
  
"Would you care to repeat that?" the old man asked in a whisper. The front wheels of his scooter rested only inches from Kwan's elbow. Kwan could smell the ozone the ecto-converter produced, and Vlad himself wasn't as daisy fresh as his suit suggested.   
  
Fear hit Kwan a second too late. He was in a submissive position, at the feet (well, wheels) of a man who had shown the entire world he wasn't above sacrificing humans if he gained something from it. Kwan could be murdered in the next ten seconds, and at this range there was no dodging. Danny was busy, so he could expect no rescue from above.   
  
Just like in the bank of future Sydney, it was up to him. And to his surprise, he stepped up to the task.   
  
The brief reprieve of Vlad's taunting question gave him enough time to get some air into his lungs. His hand shot out towards the steering column of the mobility scooter. The wires wrapped around the column were hard to grab, but he managed to wrestle his fingers around three of them. He used his whole body to yank them free, rolling with the pull. The pain in his left shoulder returned with the motion, but the wires snapped.   
  
"What?!" Vlad barked, but by then it was too late. The mobility scooter gave an almighty whine before rolling onwards, picking up speed as it went. The ecto-converter added some much-needed oomph to the mobility scooter's top speed.   
  
"Thrice-poured buckets of fudge!" Vlad spat out, trying to steer the mobility scooter or get it to stop. But apparently the wires had been important, because they sent the scooter rocketing off the island in a straight line. In the nick of time Vlad activated the anti-gravs and he floated away, speeding up even more now that there was no friction holding the wheels back.   
  
Kwan grinned to himself as he watched the old man yell out random things, the volume dwindling down the further he went away.   
  
It was one of the first fights against a ghostly enemy Kwan had won on his own. Well, he hoped he had won, because he did not want to get hit by a ghost ray again. Gingerly he got to his feet, his hand clasping his injured shoulder. A cursory examination revealed his shoulder to be still in its joint, and his sturdy jumpsuit had protected him from the worst of the blast. But he couldn't move his left arm without pain and he tasted blood in his mouth from when he bit his tongue when he fell down. Imagine what that power could do if it hit his chest, or worse, his solar plexus. He could be killed in a single blow, without even the chance to fight back.  
  
It was a good thing there weren't many hybrids around, because they were too powerful. He shuddered to think what would happen if Danny ever went rogue.   
  
Speaking of Danny, what was he up to? During the entire altercation between Vlad and Kwan he had heard the ghosts fight in the background, but he hadn't seen the combatants fly by. Maybe the fight took place below the two islands, out of sight. Kwan walked over to the edge, carefully peering downwards, trying to spot Danny.   
  
And there he was, a speck in the distance. His movements were marked by flashes of ghost rays, flung towards the other ghost. The ghost used purple rays and looked a bit larger than should be. Maybe the size of two humans stacked upon each other, maybe even larger, Kwan couldn't make out any details. The fact that Danny was still flying about made Kwan calm down a bit.   
  
With that ascertained he moved back to the ISS, bent on finding at least one weapon inside in case Vlad returned.   
  
XXX  
  
Kwan didn't like to wait, and especially not with such uncertainty. He had no way of helping Danny out or finding out where Vlad ran off to and to top it all off he had limited supplies to cool his shoulder. Ice was recommended for a sprained shoulder, but when the electricity went out after their plunge into the Ghost Zone the *refrigerator / freezer combo went with it. So he popped a strong painkiller, filled a bag with cool water and took up post next to the airlock, waiting for something to happen.   
  
The island had cleared Vlad's island with the mansion on it and already he could no longer make out certain details. Mentally he willed the ecto-converter to work even harder to carry them out of the vicinity. Vlad hadn't shown up either, but at the speed the mobility scooter took off it would take a while for him to get back.   
  
The wrench made a good weapon, he decided. Heavy, metal, relatively long reach. It was a hand-to-hand weapon, but Kwan carried the muscle strength to back his swings up should it come to that.   
  
Almost every minute he walked over to the edge and tried to see what was going on in the fight raging below. It took fourteen trips before something tipped the scales. The two ghosts had flitted left and right, up and down, but generally kept in the same area. But now the speck that was Danny flew upwards, breaking out of the imaginary box. He approached the island fast, too fast. At the last second he flipped around and Kwan could imagine the screech of rubber on asphalt when Danny threw on the brakes. He disappeared from sight but Kwan heard a dull thump coming from below. A second later Danny rocketed away, heading straight for the ghost giving chase.   
  
The ghost was close enough to identify and Kwan felt himself go cold. It was the same ghost that caused Amity Park to be transported to the Ghost Zone. The helmet the ghost wore was bigger and had more jagged edges, but the sword he raised to strike Danny was the same one that had been stuck in the football field.   
  
Danny wouldn't be able to dodge the fatal swing, he was going too fast, leaving an afterimage of green behind as he accelerated. The frightening ghost yelled a triumphant "Ha!" as he swung, following through all the way for maximum effect.  
  
The sword sliced through Danny, although he hadn't gone intangible. A ghost's sword wouldn't be fooled by that, Kwan knew at least that much. There was a slight gap around the sword as it passed through Danny's body, as if he made way for the sword by only splitting that part of his body.   
  
When Danny cleared the swing he twisted his body around and the green glow got brighter,  coalescing around his hands. At this range he couldn't miss, so he let loose the biggest blast Kwan had seen yet. The column of green encompassed the frightening ghost completely and it narrowly missed their island, shooting off into the distance. Kwan jerked back from the edge of the island in response. The blast bathed the entire station in green and the purple grass appeared to be all the wrong colors. The ghost screamed but it swiftly faded away to nothing, much like the disco ghost had done.  
  
Danny kept up the big blast for maybe three seconds before abruptly stopping the flow. Kwan blinked a few times against the spots dancing in his vision before he crawled back over to the edge to make sure the ghost was gone and Danny was okay.   
  
When he looked over the edge, he didn't see the familiar black-white figure of Phantom anywhere. Had he gone invisible? The frightening ghost was gone as well, so at least that counted as progress. Danny wasn't even visible as a speck down below, it was as if he had  vanished.   
  
"Hey," sounded from behind him, startling Kwan so bad he nearly fell over the edge. He quickly moved away from the edge and got up, trying to hide the fact that Danny had unknowingly sneaked up on him. But it was no use, the half-ghost probably felt the small spike of fear  accurately. Usually accidentally startling someone made Danny smile, but when Kwan looked at him happiness was far from Danny's expression.   
  
He was back in human form, skin pale and swaying lightly. A green smudge covered his cheek and the wound now began oozing red. His eyes were lidded and somehow in these past fifteen minutes he had gained bags under his eyes. Despite his pale skin his cheeks looked bright red and Kwan could pretty much smell on him how hard Danny had worked getting rid of the ghost. The fact that he had transformed back was a bad sign in itself, he remembered. When he passed out, he transformed back to human form. And Danny looked pretty close to passing out.   
  
"Nice job," Kwan said. "Now come on, let's get you something to drink and a place to sit."   
  
"Here's good," Danny responded, half-collapsing onto the ground in cross-legged position. He bent forward, resting his forehead on the ground and taking deep breaths. These kinds of scenarios hadn't come up in first-aid, but Kwan was a trained astronaut. Dealing with the unknown was part of the job description, as was keeping cool in weird and possibly dangerous situations. Vlad could come back any second, another ghost like the one Danny just disposed of could be around the next figurative corner of the Ghost Zone, but Kwan shoved all that aside for the moment.   
  
He had to take care of Danny.   
  
XXX  
  
  
Danny had overtaxed himself these past few days, Kwan found out. It all started with Danny somehow lifting the entire International Space Station onto an island and it all went downhill from there.   
  
The half-ghost never said a word, but the way he gathered himself told everything Kwan needed to know. Danny was at the end of his rope and there was still no possibility of some down-time in the foreseeable future. Not if they wanted to keep the space station intact. Losing it at this point would be a blow Kwan didn't know either of them could ever recover from. Especially not with Danny already relenting half his life when he was still way below voting age, giving up some sanity and lots of sleep along with it.   
  
Pangs of pain shot through Kwan's shoulder as he reached for the food and water, making him wince and use his other hand. Danny sat quietly on the ground, taking deep breaths. Kwan had to take two trips in order to get the first-aid kit by Danny's side as well, but finally he settled down on his knees next to his colleague.   
  
"You up for some water?" he asked, palming a bottle. Danny didn't respond, but his body trembled all over. Kwan put a hand on his shoulder and unconsciously leaned closer to check up on the guy. That wasn't the smartest move to pull on a trained fighter.   
  
Danny jerked back and sprung up like a somersaulting toy puppy, eyes flashing green for a second. He breathed fast, fists half-raised to ward off enemies.   
  
Too bad his body wasn't up for that anymore. Kwan reacted just in time to catch the suddenly limp weight of the half-ghost as whatever energy he still had fled out, the lithe body crumbling where he stood. The dead weight wrenched a pained cry from Kwan as he supported him awkwardly, gently letting him slide to the ground despite the agony hammering on his shoulder.   
  
"Yeah, I'm taking you inside," Kwan announced to the Ghost Zone at large. Nobody responded. He hooked his good arm around Danny's torso and began the laborious journey back to the space station. Danny wasn't heavy, but Kwan still went slow, extremely conscious of the abuse his body went through. Although it wasn't that much safer inside the space station, it sure felt like home, and home was safe. They crossed the threshold, with Kwan grunting with effort to lift his burden, when Danny came to. Kwan gently put him down on the sleeping bags now that he could ask questions and ascertain that it was only exhaustion which made Danny faint.   
  
Well, his eyes opened, but it took longer for him to form words. And even then Kwan couldn't understand them. Danny lifted a hand to his head and winced, mumbling nonsense until he seemed to regain more of his senses. His thick eyebrows curled into a frown as he looked around.  
  
"Wha'happened?" he asked. Kwan jerked his head to the airlock and regretted it a second later as various pains knocked on the door to his nervous system.   
  
"You fought a strong ghost, came back and fainted. I took you inside. Vlad is gone, hopefully for good, and I'm going to patch you up. Somehow."   
  
"I fainted?" Danny asked, voice incredulous. He tried to work himself to his elbows but had to lay down again. His voice took on a whiny quality. "That hasn't happened to me in, well, years." He wiped at some leftover sweat on his brow and frowned. "The Fright Knight's gotten stronger. Again," he mumbled as he studied the drops of liquid on his hand.   
  
Kwan took that as his cue to step outside for a bit to gather up the food, water and first-aid kit. It took him two trips this time as well, and he wished that the pain medication would kick in any minute now, because his shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat. It didn't take long to coax Danny to drink and eat something. The half-ghost no longer mumbled his words and his eyelids were no longer lidded, although there was still a paleness to his face Kwan didn't like.   
  
"The Fright Knight... how strong is he?" Kwan asked once he'd bandaged the cut on Danny's cheek and determined that, other than exhaustion and some spectacular bruises, Danny would be fine. Eventually.   
  
Danny turned over on the sleeping bag to look at Kwan, seated on the floor. “Very strong. His sword's got the ability to send people to their own personal hell, tailored to every fear you've ever carried around. It can also transport people or things to the Ghost Zone." He rolled to his back, hands latched behind his head. "He used to be a servant of the King of the Ghost Zone, but since I locked that guy away in his sarcophagus he's been working with Vlad. I'm still not sure what he wants, but whatever it is, he won't have much trouble getting it."   
  
"I could swear I've seen him before," Kwan said. "He's the one who sent Amity Park to the Ghost Zone, right?"   
  
"I'm impressed," Danny said, pulling the corners of his mouth downwards, pressing his lips together and softly bobbing his head a few times. "He's the guy. Ghost. At any rate, he's gone for the moment, as is Vlad. Awesome move, by the way, ruining that stupid scooter of his. Though I wouldn't put it past him that this was all part of his plan. Once we're both awake we have to secure the station somehow."   
  
"Agreed," Kwan said. "Although I won't be much use, I'm afraid."   
  
Danny threw him a confused look, which made Kwan point at his shoulder. "I got this one busted during my fight with Vlad. I think it's just sprained, and the pain meds are helping, but it'll still be a while before I can lift anything with it."   
  
"I'm sorry," Danny said, unlatching his hands and bunching the material of the sleeping bag between his hands. His face was neutral, only his hands moved as he wrung the bunched material as if trying to squeeze water from it.   
  
"Don't be," Kwan retorted sharply. Danny would find a way to blame himself for this, Kwan knew it. Best to head it off at the pass. "There's absolutely nothing you could have done about it.”  
  
“I could have,” Danny stubbornly claimed. “You went toe-to-wheel with Vlad Masters. He's my enemy, not yours, you shouldn't even have met him. I wasn't able to claim any successes against the man until I had my ghost powers for two years, and even then it was hard. And you're human!"   
  
Kwan cocked his head at Danny's words. "So are you. Well, now, at least."   
  
Danny opened his mouth to reply, but looked away and fiddled with something in his hands. "Can any human do this?" he asked. In the palm of his hand rested a few diamond-shaped ice-cubes, already melting at the edges. "If you get me a bag, I can create some ice for your shoulder," Danny said.   
  
Kwan let the matter whether Danny identified with humans or ghosts drop and grabbed an opened zip-lock bag from the first-aid kit. It had contained bandages, but since those now rested on either Danny or Kwan, they could reuse it. Astronauts were good at that. Danny tipped the ice-cubes inside and went on to form some more, immediately dropping them in the bag until Kwan zipped it shut. He pressed it to his shoulder and sighed in relief as the cold worked its magic.   
  
"I'mma sleep now," Danny announced, already sagging back onto the sleeping bag. Kwan decided he would scold Danny later for exerting the last of his energy on creating ice cubes. But for now he could rest his shoulder and think of a plan to make sure that Vlad would never get his hands on the ISS.  
  
XXX  
  
It didn't take long for them to notice that something was wrong once they were both awake enough to function. That one took a bit longer than usual as well, but it was hard to pinpoint what exactly was wrong.   
  
Kwan's mind immediately sprang to Vlad's recent unwilling departure and the certainty that the man would take revenge. It was a matter of getting dodge of out. That wasn't right either, his overworked brain told his mental voice. So he had a second voice inside his head, Kwan mused. Or was it once again Danny?   
  
That couldn't be, Danny sat there, eyes slowly searching the inside of the compartment. At least he wasn't as pale as before, but Kwan knew that the guy could use some food. Fighting a strong ghost like that had to awaken the hunger pangs, and if he didn't interfere now he would have a Danny on his hands who would do his utmost best to scare Kwan. Even if he did look rather harmless at the moment, a dried spot of drool at the corner of his mouth and his hair sticking out in gravity-defying positions.   
  
"Something's wrong," Danny said rather redundantly.   
  
"Yes," Kwan said. But what? It was hard to think of what could be wrong. They were both alive, well, at least Kwan was, Danny's status was up for debate. No ghost had stolen the station, they weren't currently under attack and the whine of Vlad's mobility scooter didn't appear. But still, the station was silent.  
  
Too silent! His mental voice gleefully added, glad for an opportunity to use those words. Because brains love predictability, and those words fit in that category so neatly that it came up with an entire name for that category: cliche.   
  
The thrum of the ecto-converter was gone and Kwan didn't see the propellers move from his vantage point. Kwan alerted Danny to that fact and they stumbled across the temporary floor towards the ecto-converter.   
  
"I'll inspect the propellers outside," Danny announced before changing forms, slipping through the hull in a skip and a jump. Kwan turned towards the ecto-converter and set to work, his astronaut-brain gearing up for a challenge. He had fixed so many things before, they could pull this one off as well. Hell, they had created their engine from scratch and parts from three, count 'em, three different dimensions and/or timelines. His self-pep-talk cheered him up a little as he examined the ecto-converter.  
  
The problem was fixed in ten seconds.   
  
The frosty aura of the half-ghost announced Danny's presence even before the guy spoke. "How'd you fix it?"   
  
Kwan held an empty container of ectoplasm up for Danny to see. The green slime-like substance still clung to parts of the container. "It ran out of gas," he said.   
  
"Oh," Danny replied intelligently. "That makes sense." A yawn overtook his face and he stretched, limbs a bit too bendy for a regular human. "How long was I asleep anyway?"   
  
Kwan shrugged as he put the container down, adding some more of the green goo to the tankards for good measure. That should tide them over for a couple of hours. "I dropped off as well," Kwan said. "How far are we from that Frostbite ghost?"   
  
Danny popped his head outside, and yeah, that didn't look freaky at all. When his whole body was back inside the station he shook his head. "I don't know exactly. Relative distance and all. But I do know that we're heading in the right direction."  
  
"How could you possibly know that?" Kwan asked. Was it some sort of extra sense humans lacked? Had Danny been playing him all along, guiding them in the right direction while pretending to not know where they were going? How could he benefit from that? Well, paranoia wasn't a truly unhealthy thing when you were stuck inside a hostile dimension with undead beings bent on using your emotions as food. But, his brain provided, that's a bit harsh, isn't it? Innocent until proven guilty and all that.   
  
"Because I can see it."   
  
"You're kidding me," Kwan said, already heading towards the airlock. The smile on Danny's face was enormous and Kwan felt the corners of his own mouth turn upwards in response. The moment he stepped outside he saw it. A speck in the distance, but it was definitely blue and moving closer at a slow rate.   
  
"It's going to take an hour or so to get close enough," Danny said, hovering at Kwan's back. "But we'll get there. How about I go ahead and warn Frostbite that we're coming?"   
  
"As long as you don't leave me alone for too long," Kwan said. He wanted to stay outside and watch salvation drift ever closer, but with ghosts out there that would be very interested in his body, he was going to stick inside.   
  
"Back in five," Danny promised before zooming off, his ghostly tail stretching out behind him.   
  
Kwan rechecked the backpack he carried around with his supplies while he waited. Frostbite's lair sounded like a cold place, and Kwan could use some extra clothes to ward off the cold. Kwan could by now navigate the inside of the space station in his dreams. Even before he got here he had memorized everything about the station, down to the diameter of the bolts needed to keep the toilet in place. Even so, he was hard-pressed to find some warmer clothes in the place. The space station's temperature was carefully regulated and he rarely needed more than his jumpsuit to keep himself warm.  
  
Before he could find anything useful Danny was back, hollering for Kwan to appear from wherever he was hiding. When Kwan got back to the main module they now used as entry and exit Danny hovered there, still grinning that boisterous grin of his.   
  
"Frostbite said he'd be happy to have us and that he'd have a team ready to help us move the station," Danny announced.   
  
"Great! And you're absolutely sure you can trust this ghost?" Kwan asked, just to be certain. Danny threw him a withering look which made Kwan tremble a little inside. Danny might now be his colleague, the guy had also been his childhood hero and was all-around a powerful being, geek jokes or not.   
  
"Yes," Danny simply answered in a flat tone before his joyful one bounced back. "C'mon, let's go outside and see how much longer it'll be."   
  
Kwan followed the half-ghost outside and they spent a fun few minutes guessing how much longer it'd take them. Kwan thought it would take them forty minutes, Danny guesstimated half an hour.   
  
Within reach of Frostbite's lair where no enemies of Danny's, so whenever his ghost sense went off, the guy ignored that. He did that a lot while they had been in here, considering this was the Ghost Zone. Kwan wondered how come his ... ghost sense didn't go off all the time with so many globs around, but saved that question for another time. Danny was having too much fun pointing out peculiarities of Frostbite's lair, including the hole he accidentally blew in one side when he had practiced some new powers of his. This was by now fixed, but if Kwan squinted he could still see the difference between the old, blue ice and the fresher white ice.   
  
Neither of them heard or saw anything untoward, so when they turned around and found out that the International Space Station was gone, well, that came as quite a surprise.   
  



	12. Chapter 12

  
  
"Where... What..." Kwan uttered, staring at the space where there should be a giant space station. He blinked slowly, hoping that somehow that would bring it back. But his eyelids had no impact on reality.   
  
An unholy growl of anger ripped its way from Danny and his eyes actually cast a sickly green light over his face, making him look more otherworldly than Kwan had ever seen before.   
  
"Vlad," was all Danny said. The next moment he grabbed Kwan by the arms and dragged him into the air, heading towards Frostbite's lair at full speed. They dropped through an entrance and then flew over an expanse of white. Cold air swept in but before Kwan could make out any details Danny dropped him off at a doorway, landing behind him.   
  
The door was bigger than its human counterparts as used in the modern world and it seemed to radiate cold from its metal hide. The door was set in a wall made from white-blue ice-blocks. Everything in this frozen wasteland was cold, making Kwan shiver at the sudden shift in temperature.   
  
Danny knocked on the door in front of them, eliciting a low-sounding "coming!" from the ghost inside. When it opened the door, Kwan understood why it needed a big doorway. It towered over the astronauts and looked fierce, with its horns and claws and thick fur. Its face was friendly though, and lit up even more when it spotted Danny.  
  
"Great one!" it exclaimed, pulling the half-ghost into a hug which lifted him clear off his feet. "Who have you brought along this time?" the furred ghost after putting Danny down.  
  
"Kwan, Frostbite, Frostbite, Kwan," Danny said in rapid-fire tone. "Vlad stole our space station and we need the Infini-map to track him down. It just happened so he might still be nearby. Can we borrow it?"   
  
"Of course," Frostbite answered. With a broad sweep of his paw he invited them inside his home.   
  
For the first time in his life Kwan stepped inside the abode of a Ghost-Zone dwelling creature.   
  
It was a humble house. Ghosts didn't need much to survive, so there was no need for a fridge or a pantry, and they certainly didn't need toilets. There were a lot of ice sculptures and inside it wasn't much warmer than outside. The walls carried the same white theme as the wasteland out there. Some furniture took up the corner of the room, a blue comfy chair and a coffee table were the centerpieces of the room. Picture frames lined the wall. The yeti-like creatures dominated the majority of the photos. Kwan spotted Danny and his friends in some of them, ranging from when he was a teenager to his wedding photo all the way up to him standing in front of the launch pad they had used to get to the space station.   
  
"It's around here somewhere," Frostbite said, digging into a drawer on the left side of the room. "At least, I left it in there the last time I used it. Which was a while ago, so someone might have taken it... Aha!"   
  
Frostbite straightened and held up an ancient-looking scroll, with the wooden rollers and everything.  Danny thanked Frostbite profusely and took it from his outstretched paw. Kwan noticed that the ghost had a frozen arm, with the bones visible inside of it. Wait, did ghosts have bones? They were ectoplasmic creatures, they were essentially clouds. Was it a trick of ectoplasm or was Frostbite a native creature of the Ghost Zone?   
  
Maybe life could have evolved inside this dimension, and humans hadn't found out about it yet. This discovery was huge, this could prove that-  
  
"Hold on to it and do not let go. Unless you want to get stranded in, like, Jurassic Park," Danny said, pushing part of the unrolled parchment into his hands. Before Kwan could ask what was going on Danny dragged him outside. "Thanks, Frostbite!" he yelled over his shoulder.  
  
He addressed the parchment clutched in his gloved fist and Kwan tightened his hold. "Take us to Vlad," Danny said.   
  
The next moment Kwan's arms were nearly pulled out of their sockets when the parchment came to life, his muscles seized up and he couldn't let go even if he wanted to as the document dragged him across the Ghost Zone, Danny right alongside him.   
  
They went faster than Kwan's eyes could keep up, the document pulling him left and right and up and down, soaring past doors with inches to spare as if it was going for gold. There was an insane amount of zigzagging involved and if Kwan wasn't trained to deal with zero gravity and the space sickness that entailed, he would have hurled mid-trip.  
  
But once again, there was no wind. Nothing to set his eyelids fluttering or his cheeks billowing out. There was clinical movement, heading for the unknown destination via a roundabout path. Because even though the Ghost Zone was big, there was no way that Vlad could have gotten this far in a short amount of time.  
  
The document headed for an open portal and Kwan tried to remember where they popped out, so they could find their way back in should the need arrive. But they flew too fast, too erratic for him to pinpoint the location. He could only hope that Danny had paid attention. But by the way the half-ghosts eyes were narrowed in slits of green, Kwan knew that there was only one thing on Danny's mind: reaching Vlad and ripping that scooter out from underneath his villainous ass.   
  
When the document slowed down, Kwan found himself bracing for impact. The Infini-map might not have caused them any harm yet, but they hurtled towards the ground so fast and oh, they were going to smash into that wall covered in chalkboards. At the last moment the document pulled them down and deposited them safely   
on the ground. Danny quickly rolled the scroll and put it in his backpack.  
  
The chalkboard wall was the first sign that this was the lair or room of a smart guy. The boards were covered in scrawling script, ranging from math to Cyrillic to technical drawings of ... a toilet, it looked like. Kwan recognized one of the equations as the theory of relativity, the complicated version, but whoever wrote it had made a few additions. The chalkboards were placed haphazardly all over the wall and ranged from the size of a dinner plate to one which appeared to be stolen from the biggest lecture room of an university. There were no ladders, so Kwan guessed that this was the lair of a ghost. Or maybe a universe where proper jetpacks had been invented and used in everyday life, but the green light filtering in suggested that this lair laid inside the Ghost Zone.   
  
Besides the chalkboard walls there were piles and piles of books, some neatly stacked, but most of them threatening to topple over. Someone had made an effort to organize them into bookcases, but they appeared to have given up when the ratio of books to bookcases grew exponentially. The lair smelled dusty and faintly of burnt paper. There were work benches with all kinds of tools strewn about, carrying scratches which told of hours of work. Whatever ghost populated this lair, he liked models. Cars, planes, even a miniature city underneath a glass dome were carefully labeled and organized. Tiny screwdrivers littered the area around the models.  
  
"Vlad!" Danny screamed, hands bunching into fists. His eyes were wild, searching for his arch-enemy. He floated some inches off the ground, back slightly hunched to protect himself. Kwan had seen him like that before, whenever the town hero got ready to fight.   
  
Kwan looked around, his gaze sliding across models of Earth, Jupiter and other planets hanging from the domed roof. Green light filtered inside, highlighting the leadlight images of Earth, a portal into the Ghost Zone, the scientific formula for water and the number zero.   
  
This room piqued his interest as an astronaut, but there was no sign of the International Space Station inside this room. If this Infini-map was right, Vlad was here. And the guy might be smart, even he couldn't have hidden such a huge thing so quickly, even if he had ghost powers. The question was, were was he inside this room?  
  
"Yes, m'boy?"   
  
The man of the hour was nearby. Kwan heard the whine of the electric scooter before Vlad came into view. He wore a smirk which made Kwan want to punch him, but in his eyes there was doubt. They had chased him so fast, so efficiently.   
  
And if Kwan already wanted to punch him, Danny probably had triple that desire. The half-ghost zoomed forward when Vlad showed himself. Danny cocked his fist back and landed a solid punch in the man's face. Or it would have been a solid punch, if Vlad didn't disappear right before Danny was able to land the punch. He pirouetted once before he got his momentum back under control. Kwan guessed at some sort of holographic display, because the faint blue color hadn't appeared, like when Danny used his intangibility.   
  
A hollow feeling bloomed in his gut. Had they physically checked whether or not the space station was still there? Had Vlad fooled them both with some simple holographic projectors, shielding the station from view? NASA would throw their asses in jail for abandoning the station out of sheer stupidity - they were in enough trouble as it was. By now Kwan had mentally adopted the tried teenager tactic that they were going to pull off: staying out way later than curfew so the parents got so worried that when they returned back home, the parents were too relieved to severely punish them. That usually came later, but by then the two of them hopefully wound have gained enough fame that publicly putting them on trial was bad for NASA's image.   
  
Danny had flown the both of them out of there so fast, working on the assumption that the station was gone. Maybe it was still back on that island, now adrift somewhere the Infini-map probably couldn't lead them.  
  
All this theorizing went by unnoticed by Danny. That guy was only focused on finding the real Vlad and pounding him and his scooter into the, admittedly nice, hardwood floor. There were calls from all over the place, by multiple projections. Danny flew from left to right, sometimes hidden from sight by towers of books, more chalkboards set up in the middle of the room or half-finished metal shop projects. By the sounds of it he grew more and more frustrated, until he finally flew back to Kwan.   
  
Right at that time another Vlad called out from behind a bookcase showcasing outdated versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. One last time Danny turned around and kicked the scooter. It slid into a metal table, setting two empty beakers rolling.   
  
The green fire returned to Danny's eyes and he immediately grabbed the man by his dirty lapels, lifting him half off the scooter and into the air.  
  
"Where is it?!" he bellowed.  
  
Even when threatened with imminent demise and pain, the man remained calm. Kwan remembered that about the man, the way he so calmly announced that he was a ghost and that the world would bow to him. Vlad returned Danny's gaze before pointing at the ceiling.  
  
"Out there, m'boy," he said. "You left it behind. By now I've got ghosts transporting it to a safer location than your hands. You'll never get there in time, not anymore."  
  
Danny remained silent for a longer time than Kwan was comfortable with. They had failed, they both had. They had kept it safe for so long, and with help in sight, they still lost. Kwan's head swam with the implications, and for a few seconds he found it hard to breathe. The horrible sinking feeling he carried in his gut tripled in intensity. They would get persecuted, their careers, no, their lives ruined. They would both probably end up in jail for the rest of their natural lives, if Danny didn't end up in the laboratory of the Guys in White when they inevitably found out that he was Danny Phantom. Kwan would do untold damage to his wife. He loved her and she loved him, but it took a lot of guts to still marry a guy who had no way of getting out of prison.   
  
"You're lying," Danny slowly said, his eyes narrowing. Vlad scoffed and managed to look indignant even while dangling in Danny's grip. "I know you by now," Danny continued. "And you're bluffing. It's here, somewhere. You don't trust another ghost with that kind of power, that tech in their hands."  
  
Danny unceremoniously let go of Vlad. The man fell in a heap to the floor, his crippled legs unable to support him.   
  
"This place looks expensive," Danny said. "Let's put the pro back in quid pro quo, right?" He cracked his knuckles and an off-kilter grin appeared, which looked more at home on the face of an evil ghost than Kwan's childhood hero. "Cover your ears, Kwan," he said before turning his back to the both of them. He took an impossibly deep breath and let the full force of his Ghostly Wail loose on the place. Stacks of books toppled, chalkboards crashed down from walls and the models rocked back and forth on their wires, some of them twisting loose and crashing to the floor.   
  
"NO!" Vlad screamed, hand outstretched. He blasted Danny in the back, cutting the wail short before it could reach full capacity. In the aftermath more items gave in to gravity, continuing the crashes even while Danny dealt with Vlad.   
  
A second "No!" echoed from behind Kwan, this time a different voice than Vlad's. Kwan whirled around, but he was too late. Someone tossed an item to the floor near Vlad while at the same time a blue beam of light ensnared Danny, drawing his ghostly tail out as it sucked him inside. He fought it, but the pull of the beam was too strong. The item near Vlad expanded, turning into a see-through blue box, phasing through Vlad and trapping him inside. Vlad's head immediately dropped to the floor, eyes closing. The blue beam disappeared, taking Danny with it and sealing him into a thermos.   
  
  
* * *  
  
The person holding the thermos was a ghost, judging by the floating and the glowing blue skin. His eyes were enlarged by thick glasses, and judging by his clothing he had been a scientist in his past life. The lab coat he wore was smeared with grey and green and underneath it he wore a Christmas sweater which could've competed in the Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest. It probably would have won first price. The ghost was bald and had large ears, but his scowl was fierce enough that Kwan would not have made fun of him. Well, maybe in high school, but that was another world entirely.   
  
With Danny incapacitated for the moment, Kwan hoped that this ghost wasn't the crazy scientist type. He sure looked angry enough to kill.   
  
"You're human," came the accusation. Kwan nodded awkwardly, not sure whether the ghost thought that was good or bad. He hadn't forgotten his emotions could be used as a battery for ghosts.   
  
"You're an astronaut," the ghost stated. Kwan looked down at his logo'd jumpsuit and nodded again.   
  
"Yeah, and we're here looking for our space station. Danny didn't mean to trash... this place. Your lair? Vlad took it from us, and we need to get it back to its proper orbit."   
  
The ghost lowered the thermos and palmed a small blue cube, much like the one Vlad was currently trapped in, albeit a much smaller size. Kwan talked fast to ensure that he didn't suffer the same fate.  
  
"If this is your lair, all this is your property, right? I'm a scientist myself, on board the space station we're studying ectoplasm and carry out dozens of other experiments. Imagine if all that data got lost, it'd be a disaster. It already is, because Vlad took it from us. He wants to use it for himself, maybe even turn it into a weapon."   
  
The ghost stopped palming the cube, but his scowl remained. Kwan stepped forward, putting a hand on his chest.   
  
"My name is Kwan Lin. You're doctor..."  
  
"Wort," the ghost said. "Just Wort. I never liked the 'doctor' part."   
  
Wort's voice echoed more than Danny's and Kwan had a bit of trouble understanding him, especially with the foreign accent he couldn't place.   
  
"It's nice to meet you, Wort. I can't apologize enough that Danny wrecked your lair. He thought it belonged to Vlad-"  
  
Kwan stopped talking when Wort held up the hand with the cube in it to indicate that Kwan should stop. He placed the cube on a nearby work bench but kept hold of the thermos. This thermos differed from Danny's only in coloring. Danny's were green and shiny, this one was matte grey with a purple band around it. A light indicated that the thermos was occupied. Kwan hoped that Danny was able to survive in one of those things, because getting enough oxygen might be a problem in there.   
  
"Why exactly have you transported the International Space Station to the Ghost Zone? Has it been decommissioned already?"   
  
Kwan breathed a sigh of relief as the ghost lost some of his scowl. Quickly he ran through the tale of Technus' attack and their subsequent search of engine parts. As Kwan talked, he saw that Wort began to relax. His eyes wandered away from Kwan and he looked around, taking in the damage. At first glance it looked like a disaster area, but most of the items were intact. Books were sturdy enough to take a beating, and most of the models had survived the attack as well.   
  
"So this mysterious map takes us to this place, Danny finds Vlad, and then you show up," Kwan finished. Wort floated away and began stacking books, taking care to avoid glass from shattered beakers.   
  
"I see," he simply said. "It was very irresponsible to transport the station," he noted, and then blew a big sigh. "But Technus is one moronic, if muscular ghost."   
  
"So..." Kwan prodded, crouching down to pick up a few models and put them back on tables, "do you perhaps know where it is?"   
  
Wort nodded, but said nothing. He needed both hands to upright a table, so he set the thermos down. Kwan eyed it, judged the distance, but there were too many obstacles between the thermos and him to grab it. He had been good at football, not hurdling.   
  
"I'm not sure I should give it back, though," Wort said after a long pause. He drifted further away and the odds of grabbing the thermos in time increased. "Vlad has been insistent that Danny Phantom is a temperamental youth who needs to have his brain re-examined, and you sound just the same. You could've waited on that island until Technus was gone, rip a new hole and contact NASA, I hope you do realize that."   
  
Kwan ran his hands over a model of planet Jupiter, over and over again while he argued back. "There was no guarantee that we would've ended up in the same orbit. Danny says that he can't sense the leylines, and I believe him. We could have ended up anywhere, not just in space outside Earth."  
  
Wort righted a chalkboard and indicated the complicated equation on it. There were some non-existent symbols added in the mix, but Kwan didn't have time to focus on it when Wort began to talk. Lecture, really, easily adopting the tone of a tried teacher.   
  
"Even if Phantom isn't a full ghost, he should be able to sense the leylines. Or at least, he should be able to calculate where they are with this simple formula," he showed the formula on the chalkboard," in combination with that one." The ghost pointed at the wall of chalkboards, but deflated when he saw that several chalkboards had collapsed to the ground. "Well, it used to be there. I'll have to write it down again. Vlad owes me some new ones for leading you people here in the first place. In fact, he owes me a new lab!" The ghost grumbled for a few seconds. "Or you could've coated the walls of the station with helenorium, keeping enemy ghosts out."  
  
"I'm sorry, helenorium?" Kwan couldn't help but ask. Wort looked put out for a few seconds before he remembered something.  
  
"You call it ectoranium, I believe. I discovered it, you know. I wanted to name it after my wife, but that jerk Peterson beat me to it. 'Ectoranium', pah, it has no personal element to it."  
  
As the ghost talked, Kwan put the model of Jupiter down on a table right next to a metal briefcase and picked up other assorted planets. Pluto, although technically not a planet anymore, was still among the models. Apparently Wort didn't like changes all that much. The models had all survived the Ghostly Wail and the subsequent fall on the hardwood floor.   
  
"But since we didn't know how to find your leylines or enough ectoranium, and we will give you all the data we have on our experiments," Kwan said, making sure to entice the science-loving ghost, "could you please help us get the station back?"   
  
Wort stopped writing a formula on the chalkboard and gave Kwan a long, hard look.   
  
"You will take it back into space?" he asked in an authoritative tone. Kwan nodded. "You promise you'll take better care of it?" Another nod. "And I get a copy of all the data from these and future experiments?"   
  
Kwan began to nod, but stopped in time to call it a half-nod. "I'm not sure I can wrangle that for you... But I'll do my best," Kwan answered truthfully. He did not want an angry ghost chasing him all his life (and afterlife), so it was best to tell the truth. Nerd could be vicious.   
  
Wort put the chalk down and sighed deeply. He floated over to a gun-like device and picked it up. The gun was huge compared to the ghost, bigger than the biggest RPG Kwan had ever seen, and with a much wider barrel. Like the thermos this one had a purple band around it as well. Wort wielded it effortlessly though as he floated over to Kwan. Carefully he removed the planet models Kwan had placed upon the metal briefcase and gently picked it up.   
  
"Follow me," Wort said.   
  
"I'd love to, but I can't exactly fly," Kwan said. "But Danny can take me."   
  
Wort peered at Kwan over his glasses before sighing and putting the gun down. "Fine, but if the boy attacks me, I'm keeping the station."   
  
"Fair enough," Kwan agreed, hoping that somehow the thermos let sound through so Danny wouldn't come out guns blazing. Or that Kwan could talk him out of it quickly enough.   
  
With one hand Wort grabbed the thermos and pressed a button. Blue light shot out of it in reverse direction and dumped the ghostly form of Danny on the ground. Kwan immediately began talking, calming Danny down, telling him that Wort was going to give them the station back. Danny looked back at Kwan over his shoulder.  
  
"Really? No ifs, then, elses or buts?" he asked skeptically.   
  
"I'm a ghost of my word," Wort replied.   
  
"We'll see about that," Danny replied, but he didn't bowl the ghost over, so Kwan counted that one as a win. Wort hoisted the gun back up onto his shoulder and floated out the door. Kwan threw a glance at the peacefully sleeping (unconscious?) Vlad inside the blue box. At least that guy was out for the count right now, unable to steal the station back. Kwan wasn't sure where Wort had hidden it, but if he was going to lead them into a trap with the station as bait, it was far more logical to spring the trap inside his own lair than out there in the Ghost Zone.   
  
When Kwan put an arm over Danny's shoulder the tingly feeling felt welcome. It meant that they were getting out of this freaky place and back into somewhat familiar territory.   
  
Wort was fast for such a geeky-looking ghost. Danny flew fast to catch up with him, expertly weaving around doors in a crazy game of dodge ball. And no wonder Fenton had always been good at that game in gym class, Kwan realized. The ghost led them back to their island, engine and all. Kwan couldn't help but feel jealous at the ease Wort navigated the complicated dimension. Then again, he'd rather be alive than be able to read leylines.   
  
"Alright, where is it?" Danny demanded, landing on the edge of the island and letting go of Kwan. Kwan took a few steps forward, away from the edge. Looked like the half-ghost had lost all fears of heights after years of flying, but Kwan didn't fancy a tumble into the unknown.   
  
Wort very carefully put the metal briefcase down and opened it.  
  
And there it was, lovingly placed into more insulation than was used to transport human organs. The miniaturized version of the International Space Station. From afar it looked like a model, but as Kwan stepped closer he knew it was the original. There were dents in the oxygen tank courtesy of Technus' satellite and the airlock had been left open from when they had stepped outside to look at Frostbite's lair. It looked like a doll house, it was so tiny. The entire station, including the protruding solar panels was about the size of a basketball.   
  
Danny slapped his own forehead and groaned. "The Fenton Crammer... I'm an idiot."   
  
"Step back," Wort warned, aiming the wide barrel of the gun at the station. His blue tongue peeked out as he carefully took aim and fired a purple blast. Within seconds the station began to expand, making Kwan take a few steps back as metal hull came very close. The station stopped growing and the metal ticked as it settled down. Kwan feared for the state inside, but at least they had it back.   
  
Wort lowered the gun and sighed. "I can't believe I'm giving it back to you. You!" he stated, pointing at Danny and throwing him a glare, "better make sure that this gets back into space in one piece!"   
  
Danny saluted the ghost. "Of course... What do you think we've been doing? Gallivanting around the Ghost Zone?"   
  
Wort snorted and adjusted his glasses. "I wouldn't put it past you, Phantom. You've shown amazing lack of respect before."   
  
Green eyes glowed brighter, but then settled. Danny blew out a breath and lowered his shoulders. "Thanks for giving it back. But you shouldn't have stolen it in the first place."   
  
The geeky ghost harrumphed. "I can't exactly defy a direct order from Vlad. He's the one who keeps the equipment rolling in. Now, the data?"   
  
In the end they gave him a hard drive with the data loaded onto it, torn from its RAID setup. It wasn't the neatest of solutions, but otherwise they'd have to scrounge up a laptop which still worked, copy the data from the dead server and pray that it was compatible somehow. Kwan was no master at the whole tech thing, but even he knew that if a server had gone down, it took some wizardry to hoist it back up and into workable condition. Especially with the connection to Earth's internet lost at the time. So a hard drive would have to do.   
  
Wort longingly and lovingly stroked parts of the module as he exited the station. Danny stationed himself outside until he was sure that Wort had gone back to his lair and wouldn't attempt to take the space station from under their noses again.   
  
Kwan meanwhile reconnected the engine and barely even noticed the few minutes Danny was gone to take the Infini-map back to Frostbite.   
  
"From this point on I know the way," Danny said once he was back. Kwan fired up the engine and it sputtered to life, and the floating island moved forward inch by inch until they were back at their previous pace. Far Frozen slowly disappeared behind them while Danny steered them back home.   
  
Kwan knew it wouldn't be far now. It looked like their adventure was almost over.   
  



	13. Chapter 13

The lab smelled like home, even if it currently stank of cleaning chemicals. Alarms sounded the second they soared through the portal to the Ghost Zone. Danny's smile was enormous and Kwan knew his face mirrored that expression. They were home.  
  
Kwan had only been inside the Fenton basement once in his life, when he had received the hazmat-suit from Danny the day the adults got kidnapped. All he remembered was that it smelled strongly of chemicals, it was big and filled with a supernatural green glow thanks to the many beakers of ectoplasm littering a few desks.   
  
Now, the basement was even bigger but the lighting was better. The smell had stayed the same, though. Gym equipment was stowed away in a part of the basement and Kwan spotted not one but two entrances to the basement. He dimly recalled Danny telling him that his parents had bought the house next door and moved out, leaving Fentonworks in Danny's hands. They must have used that extra ground to expand the basement, then, but he knew the Fentons. They wouldn't give up their life's work that easily, so the laboratory probably still belonged to them.   
  
Whatever legal tangle that entailed, all it meant was that Sam came storming down the stairs in her pajamas from the entrance leading up to Fentonworks. She aimed a Fenton thermos at them as she took the last few steps.   
  
Danny set them down on the floor and let go of Kwan. Phantom held his hands in front of him in a placating fashion.  
  
"Hey, Sam," he said, still with a smile on his face. "We're back," he continued. Sam still held the Thermos in front of her, her sleep-crusted eyes flitting from Danny to Kwan and back.   
  
"If you're really Danny, what's the password?"   
  
Danny looked confused for a second. He hovered two inches above the ground, the grin fading from his face. "Password? We've never talked about a password... I mean, we have a cool handshake, but that's about... Wait, are you talking about my specific attack?"  
  
Sam didn't say anything. Danny backed up a bit and clenched his fist. When he opened it a small icicle rested in it. Sam's eyes softened the slightest bit. Next, Danny threw it into the air and shattered it with a pulse of his Ghostly Wail, the brief spike of energy setting off another alarm.   
  
When Danny finally settled down and let the two rings pass over his body, Sam lowered the Thermos. She let it clatter to the ground as she rushed towards him. Kwan discretely looked away as husband and wife reunited with each other.   
  
The laboratory somehow suited Danny. Kwan guessed that he spent a lot of time here. Danny's handwriting adorned post-its on various items and a few pictures of him, Sam, Tucker, Danny's family and combinations of all those people were scattered across the desks. A few beakers filled with globs were safely tucked behind a ghost shield. One of them had red eyes and stared straight at Kwan. So that one was evolving, then. Probably why there was a laptop wired up to the ghost shield, showing a read-out Kwan couldn't decipher at this distance.   
  
When Kwan looked back over to Danny and Sam, they were still lip-locked. He coughed into his fist to break them up, they still had business to attend to after all. Sam pulled away first, and Danny reluctantly let go of his wife. Something hit her then, because she gasped.  
  
"Danny! Does he-"  
  
"Yes, he knows I'm Phantom. He took it really well, actually."  
  
Kwan didn't know what to say to that so he pointed at the ghost shield. "Thanks, I guess, but first, we have to put that human-ghost shield around the station."   
  
That remark made Danny spring back into action. He transformed into his more ethereal form and grabbed a carefully labeled device from a shelf. The shelves looked well-organized and orderly, every loose item stuffed into a box and labeled. Here and there were traces of a less-organized person trying to adhere to the same system, but the large effect was one of orderliness.   
  
"Be right back," Danny said. Sam harrumphed and crossed her arms.  
  
"That's what you said last time."  
  
Danny hesitated for a second before he flew into the glowing green portal to the Ghost Zone, leaving his wife without a reply. And Kwan alone with Sam.   
  
The feisty girl he'd known from high school had grown into, well, a feisty woman. Since they had woken her up she lacked the bold make-up she used to wear and maybe still wore, but her hair was still dyed jet-black. She had grown it out a bit, cut into a better fit for her face than a ponytail atop her head. Her pajama spoke of her love for all things dark and gothic (but still practical). It was basically a wide t-shirt with pajama bottoms, but both were blood-red with a black trim. Kwan spotted a small band logo on her shirt, but he couldn't make out what band it was.   
  
With her bare feet and the Fenton thermos holder strapped over her shoulder she looked like a weird combination of pre-coffee person and warrior princess. As she talked to him, she smoothed her hair over so strands of it didn't stick out so much anymore.   
  
"What in the hell happened out there? I suddenly got a call from NASA, telling me that there was a problem with the station. They told me that they had lost contact, but Tucker found out that the whole station had vanished. So, what gives?"   
  
Kwan knew he'd have to tell this story again and again over the next few weeks, months maybe. But he could tell the truth to Phantom's wife.   
  
"Technus attacked, Danny pushed us into the Ghost Zone, we created an engine from parts all over various dimensions and made our way back, taking the station with us."   
  
That pretty much covered it, Kwan thought to himself. Sam looked over to the portal. "So the station is just outside?"   
  
Kwan nodded. "Danny's securing it with a, a human-ghost portal he called it. Oh, and congrats on marrying Phantom, by the way."   
  
Ah, and there was the protective streak Kwan recognized from his high-school days. Sam stood up for whoever she wanted, whether it be herself, her friends, a sack of flour or even a ghost. The woman stared straight into Kwan's eyes, a dangerous expression on her face. She looked like she was ready to use the thermos on him, had it worked on humans. As it was, she took a few steps closer and Kwan realized that Sam hadn't grown much in the years they hadn't seen each other, because he towered over her like he had always done.   
  
"I don't know how or when you found out, but trust me - you don't want to tell anyone else. It's his secret, and his alone, and he's the only one who gets to out him when he thinks the time is right. And right now, he enjoys being an astronaut. So I will come after you if you tell anyone."   
  
Kwan held his hands up in defense, but couldn't help but narrow his eyes at her in return. "Sam, I'm not going to talk. I respect him too much for that, and who would believe me without proof? I'm not the high school jock you remember me as. We've been through a lot, and I thank you to keep that in mind when you threaten me. Hell, I even let him overshadow me, how much more trusting can you get? When Danny thinks the time is right, he will tell the world."  
  
"You're right, I will," Danny's voice drifted over to them from behind. Both of them turned to him and watched as Danny put down the device powering the human-ghost shield. A flickering ray of energy trailed from it, disappearing into the whorls of the portal. "But I'm not ready. Thanks, Kwan."  
  
"Did you have any doubt I was going to tell anyone?" Kwan wanted to know. Danny smiled at him, transforming back into his human form. He pulled a hand through his hair and had trouble getting it out, his hair was all knotted up thanks to all the flying and fighting he had done over the past week. But he kept talking as he untangled his hand.  
  
"Nah, I mean, we did a joined overshadowing. I could pretty much look into your brain."   
  
Kwan chuckled awkwardly at that. He hadn't been able to look into Danny's brain. He let it go for now, focusing on the situation at hand.  
  
"The station is secure?" At Danny's nod Kwan looked over at Sam. "Think you can help us figure out what we're going to tell NASA?"  
  
Danny and Sam both laughed. "We're going to have to come up with a pretty damn good story to tell them, because a cross-Ghost Zone trip probably won't cut it," Danny said. Kwan shrugged.  
  
"We don't have to tell them we visited different dimensions... or our future... or the past..." Kwan continued, and Sam appeared more and more interested the more details they talked about.   
  
"Sounds like you two had a hell of an adventure," Sam said. Danny and Kwan looked at each other.   
  
"Yeah, we did. And truth be told, it was fantastic," Kwan said with a huge grin on his face.   
  
XXX  
  
Kwan hummed softly to himself as he eyed the plate of cookies on the table. Danny was in the kitchen of Fentonworks, making tea or coffee, Kwan was not sure.   
  
NASA was ecstatic that the space station had returned, even if it was currently located in another dimension. Kwan heard one tech weep with joy, but he's not sure whether that was because the astronauts had returned, or if he was so happy that the specific laptop he had designed for space (and was in the process of being tested by Kwan) had come back to its inventor. He tried not to dwell on that.   
  
"How's Sam?" Kwan asked, talking a bit louder to be heard in the kitchen from the living room.   
  
"She's fine," Danny said while moving closer with a tray beverages. He appeared in the doorway and set the tray down on the table before plopping down on the couch next to Kwan. "She barely lets me out of the house, to be honest. I pretty much have to beg her to let me go ghost hunting, she's afraid that I'll disappear again. Even if she won't put it like that. It'll wear off soon, Sam's too tough for that."  
  
Kwan chuckled. His own fiancée was clingy as well, to the point where he had to sneak out of the house to meet Danny (leaving a note behind, because he didn't like sleeping on the couch) while she was taking a bath. In his case, he knew it'd be a while before she trusted that he'd come home again.  
  
"I hear you," he said. He took his cup of coffee from the tray and blew on it. Danny did the same and they remained silent for a bit, relaxing in each other's company. Kwan never thought he'd be able to sit in Phantom's home, or even think about the home of a ghost. NASA paid their astronauts well, but Kwan knew that if Danny chose to make ghost hunting his official profession, they could still afford Fentonworks on Sam's salary as an environmental lawyer. Besides, no one in their right mind would want to buy a house with a portal dimension in the basement.   
  
"How's Fred?" Danny asked, a bit in jest. Kwan grinned, peeking over his cup at Danny.  
  
"Still berating me for losing his other laptop," he said. Danny laughed.  
  
"I think it's floating somewhere between Technus' failed two satellites."   
  
NASA was halfway through fixing the international space station. Kwan was here on half-official business, acting as a buffer between Danny and NASA's inquiries.   
  
Kwan had never appreciated Danny's talent to lie more than when they had to explain what had happened to the billions of dollars of development and materials they had dragged with them through a hostile environment. The official version was that nothing had happened, the communication system had simply malfunctioned. The version spun for NASA's ears was that Technus had created a wormhole to steal the satellite, but Danny and Kwan had fought him off with the ectoplasm experiments on board the station. Then, using the weird property of Earth items floating inside the Ghost Zone, had propelled it through the Ghost Zone using nothing but a rudder and the thrusters powered by the ecto-converter. A helpful Danny Phantom had helped them on the last stretch of their journey, guiding them to the portal and then they had secured it with a human-ghost shield.   
  
It turned out that besides Kwan there was one other person who knew that Danny was Phantom: their direct supervisor. She helped them spin the true tale into one that was outlandish enough to be believable, while still giving enough detail that it seemed like the truth.   
  
"She's the one who recruited me," Danny said when Kwan had questioned how the woman knew, immediately after she'd debriefed them. "She approached me while I was Phantom and offered me the job." Danny scratched behind his ear as he spoke. "I'd gotten job offers before, most of them dealing with rather illegal requirements."   
  
"What, fly into a bank safe and steal all the jewelry?" Kwan asked, a bit in jest. But then again, intangibility lent itself well to stealing, he'd experienced it firsthand.   
  
"Among others, yes. Murder, spying, the usual. Human nature, sometimes..." Danny sighed. "I mean, I'm one of the good guys. I don't get why people would think I'd kill someone when I spend so much time defending everything and everyone."   
  
"Yeah," Kwan countered, "but you've got power. People like that. So, what made you decide to tell her?"   
  
Danny shrugged. "Hard to tell. She liked me for who I was, she believed in me while there were still many people with doubts. She helped me study and become a proper astronaut, instead of a ghost astronaut only selected because I couldn't be killed and had oodles of ectoplasm to spare." Danny looked a bit sheepish and Kwan knew that Danny had done something stupid or silly while studying. He remained the geek Kwan knew and could not relate to in high school.   
  
"Technus got me with some kind of disruptor ray based on the Plasmius Maximus that day. Basically, it shorted out my powers for short periods of time... starting three hours from the point where I got zapped. I was nose-deep in the manual for the comms array and all of a sudden I changed back."   
  
"And that's when she offered to train you for real?"  
  
Danny shook his head. "No, that's when she refused to believe me when I said I was the true Danny Phantom and not a shape shifting ghost. I could've used that as an out... but I didn't. I wanted to become a human astronaut, not a ghostly one. So she helped me make that dream real."   
  
Kwan and Danny told her the truth about their journey. She gave them a severe dressing down, but ultimately ended with "good job, now scram while I try to create a report about this without giving away Danny's second half."   
  
They both agreed that she was more than capable of doing that. They talked some more about the new crew that was going to go to the station after them, but finally Kwan headed home to his angry fiancée with the knowledge that even the mighty Phantom had a wife who could make him sleep on the couch.   
  
XXX  
  
Kwan watched the monitors with bated breath. 'Someone' in NASA 'just so happened' to run into Danny Phantom and was 'able to convince him' to push the space station through a rip in the Ghost Zone, back into orbit.  
  
It was unnerving to have Fenton standing by his side, intently studying the monitors while the original Phantom worked hard out there, pushing the entire station. Kwan noticed that Fenton acted dazed, so he covered for him as best as he could, answering questions for him, drawing attention away from the way Fenton swayed on his feet.  
  
Danny had said that transporting a station took a tremendous amount of effort and Kwan expected the duplicate to disappear any second now. He and his superior had worked out a plan if that happened, but then the swirling green rip in the space-time continuum disappeared and Fenton began to smile and move a bit. The hard part was over, now Danny had to maneuver it into proper orbit, guided by the calculations of the NASA nerds, as Kwan mentally called them.   
  
It had taken some convincing to get the approval from the office of the administrator to get a ghost to help them. Kwan and his supervisor didn't have to campaign as hard as they had feared - a lot of engineers had helped on the 'turn the entire Earth intangible' project - so they trusted the famous specter. It took another visit to Doctor Wort to finish the calculations where the proper leyline lay to move the space station into space and not accidentally into another dimension. Once they had calculated that using Doctor Wort’s equations, all Phantom needed to do was physically push the portal through the rip.   
  
"We should recruit him," one of the engineers lamented. Kwan suppressed a grin at that remark. They had recruited Phantom, and trained him, in secret.   
  
On the monitors Danny stretched luxuriously when he got the green light from the orbit crew that the station was in its proper position. He thanked them for trusting him with the station before he hurled himself towards the Earth. Kwan felt a pang of jealousy that Danny was able to experience re-entry without a metal shell protecting him. It had to be exhilarating to see the continents move closer, to break through the clouds and watch the curvature of the Earth fade into a seemingly horizontal line.   
  
The engineers burst into applause and Kwan and Fenton joined them. They got to go up again soon and finish what they had started.   
  
XXX  
  
It was night time inside the ISS for Danny and Kwan. Their bodies snugly fit inside their sleeping strapped to the wall. It felt good to be back inside the International Space Station, finishing up their mission and paving the way for the new astronauts to take over the ecto-converter and the various ectoplasm-based experiments. The first order of business had been installing a ghost shield. 

Danny appeared to be fast asleep, but despite his exhaustion Kwan couldn't join him in the dreamscape. Snippets from their adventure inside the Ghost Zone kept popping up, from the look of a girl in future Australia to the feeling of flying. Especially that last one stayed with him for a long time. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to become a ghost after death if the trade-off was flying. As long as he could stave off the urge to scare people. Which he probably couldn't, since even as a half-ghost Danny succumbed to that craving. 

Without even bothering to check if Kwan was awake, Danny suddenly started talking. It wasn't the slurred speech of sleep. Blue eyes looked at him with clarity in them as Danny began to talk. 

“It happened when I was fourteen. The accident which turned me into a half-ghost. Me, Sam and Tucker, I’m sure you remember him, we all went downstairs into my parent’s lab…”

And slowly, as the Earth revolved underneath them and they were caught in the endless night of space, Danny told Kwan the true story of Danny Phantom. He painted the pictures so vividly Kwan could see them in his mind. The terror of discovery, the exhilaration of flying, the first fight, the hopelessness of defeating Vlad Masters, it all flowed from Danny’s mouth into Kwan’s eager ears. 

And while the Earth kept revolving, the night of space seemed a little less dark. Kwan realized he’d just made a new best friend. 

**The End**   
  



End file.
